REFERENCING

THE DOCTOR
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I
was only a lad, and it was a long time
ago, but I can vividly remember the
excitement I felt as I made my way
to the first floor of my local
bookshop. There was a pair of swing doors
at the top of the stairs, but I recall they were
already open... clearly revealing the object
of my desire. In the middle of the shop
floor was a table piled high with books, but
dominating them all was a large hardback
leaning against a stand. As I plucked a book
from the top of the pile I could scarcely
believe its weight. Could it be true? Had
someone actually written a proper, ‘grown-up’
book all about the making of Doctor Who?
The year was 1983, and I had finally got
my hands on a copy of Peter Haining’s
Doctor Who: A Celebration. I devoured every
page and I’m sure I could still recite some
REFERENCING
THE DOCTOR
of the passages relating to William Hartnell
and the other legendary figures featured
inside. Haining was a talented anthologist
who summoned a virtual reunion of Doctor
Who luminaries – both alive and dead – for
a lavish and sometimes poignant lap of
honour. A Celebration was unique in 1983,
but that didn’t stop me regarding this as the
show’s ultimate reference work.
I still have the copy I bought that day,
although some of the pages are a little frayed
around the edges and the colours on the
sun-bleached spine aren’t as vivid as they
once were. Why have I kept it for so long?
It must be sentimentality, because the book
I once regarded as unsurpassable was in
fact just the first in a very long line. As the
1980s progressed it seemed the standard
for Doctor Who reference works improved
every year. By the 1990s there was an
overwhelming choice of high-quality books,
magazines and fanzines dissecting Doctor
Who’s history.
The Doctor Who reference industry will
continue for as long as there is a demand for
obscure facts, new interpretations and rare
photographs. Those of us lucky enough to
maintain this turnover should know better
than to describe any of our endeavours as
‘the last word’ on the subject. While Doctor
Who continues to expand and evolve, any
examination of its mysteries can only ever be
a work in progress.
And that includes this magazine.
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 3 . .
 EDITOR
MARCUS HEARN 6 Through the Magic Door 58 A Brief History of Time
ART EDITOR Doctor Who fans have always had an insatiable Chronicles of Doctor Who’s fictional universe
PERI GODBOLD desire to discover the secrets behind their have often attempted to reconcile confusing
DEPUTY EDITOR
favourite television show. aspects of its continuity.
PETER WARE
12 The History of Doctor Who 62 The Publisher’s Tale
DESIGN ASSISTANT Story editor Dennis Spooner retired from the BBC Books publishing director Albert DePetrillo
MIKE JONES
Doctor Who production team in 1965, but he left describes how his range of Doctor Who
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT an important document for his successor. non-fiction has developed.
EMILY COOK
SPECIAL THANKS 16 Mac Books 66 The Indie Scene
JONATHAN RIGBY Working alongside his friend Terrance Dicks, If your Doctor Who manuscript is too niche
Malcolm Hulke was the first author to reveal for a mainstream audience, it could find a home
Managing Director MIKE RIDDELL
how Doctor Who was made. with an independent publisher.
Managing Editor ALAN O’KEEFE
Head of Production MARK IRVINE
Production Assistant JEZ METEYARD 20 Special Occasion 70 Writers’ Tales
Circulation and Trade Marketing Controller REBECCA SMITH In 1973 the Radio Times published a 10th Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook discuss
Head of Marketing JESS TADMOR
anniversary guide to Doctor Who, illustrated both editions of their groundbreaking book
Marketing Executives JESS BELL
with a wealth of previously unseen photos. The Writer’s Tale.
BBC WORLDWIDE, UK PUBLISHING
Director of Editorial Governance ............................................. NICHOLAS BRETT
22 Monster Mash 72 Graphic Detail
Director of Consumer Products and Publishing ................... ANDREW MOULTRIE In the second half of the 1970s Terrance Dicks Books featuring colourful infographic diagrams
Head of UK Publishing ................................................................... CHRIS KERWIN wrote a series of books for younger readers make even the most complex aspects of Doctor Who
Publisher ...................................................................................... MANDY THWAITES
Publishing Co-ordinator .................................................................. EVA ABRAMIK that explored the series’ history. easier to understand.
UK.Publishing@bbc.com
www.bbcworldwide.com/uk--anz/ukpublishing.aspx
26 STINFO Maniacs 76 The Bookkeeper
THANKS TO: The first in-depth research into the programme Doctor Who’s account brand manager
BBC Wales, BBC Written was conducted by members of the nascent Edward Russell oversees approvals for books
Archives Centre, bbc.co.uk,
John Ainsworth, Melissa Beattie, Doctor Who Appreciation Society. and other licensed products.
Jeremy Bentham, Kit Bevan,
Miles Booy, Chris Chibnall, 30 Foundation Trilogy 78 Historical Accuracy
Natalie Clubb, Benjamin Cook,
Russell T Davies, Albert
Jean-Marc Lofficier’s Doctor Who Programme The partwork Doctor Who: The Complete History
DePetrillo, Terrance Dicks, Guide helped to initiate a new style of aims to chronicle the entire production of the series
Stuart Douglas, John Fitton, reference book for the 1980s. in lavish hardback volumes.
John Freeman, Gary Gillatt,
Derek Handley, Matt Hills,
Tim Hirst, David J Howe, 34 Making History 82 What’s in a Name?
Antony Keen, Jean-Marc Doctor Who reference went mainstream with Reference books and archive documentation
Lofficier, Joe McIntyre, Leslie the lavish souvenir that Peter Haining compiled have given fans the power to write, and rewrite,
McMurtry, Simon Middleton,
Brian Minchin, Steven Moffat, to celebrate the show’s 20th anniversary. their own history of Doctor Who.
Ben Morris, Dexter O’Neill, Lindy Orthia, Lars Pearson, Adrian
Rigelsford, Edward Russell, Gary Russell, Andrew Skilleter, Paul Smith, 38 Texting the Doctor
JR Southall, Mark Stammers, Matt Strevens, Jan Vincent-Rudzki,
Paul Vyse, Stephen James Walker and Matt West.
The unfolding history of cultural studies books
that analyse the subtexts and other hidden
Like our page at: www.facebook.com/doctorwhomagazine meanings in Doctor Who.
Follow us at: www.twitter.com/dwmtweets
42 Mail Order Man
Advertising Madison Bell Telephone 0207 389 0859
Email jack.daly@madisonbell.com
During the 1980s and 90s thousands of fans
turned to mail-order dealer John Fitton for
Subscriptions See page 99
Doctor Who books and other merchandise.
Doctor Who Magazine™ Special Edition #47
– Referencing the Doctor published August 2017 46 The Stuff of Legend
by Panini UK Ltd. Office of publication: Panini UK Ltd, Jeremy Bentham’s 1986 book Doctor Who: The
Brockbourne House, 77 Mount Ephraim, Tunbridge
Wells, Kent, TN4 8BS. Published every four weeks.
Early Years brought some overdue recognition to
All Doctor Who material is © BBCtv 2017. Doctor Who logo ™ & © BBC 2017. one of the series’ most important designers.
Daleks © Terry Nation. All other material is © Panini UK Ltd unless otherwise
indicated. No similarity between any of the fictional names, characters persons
and/or institutions herein with those of any living or dead persons or institutions is 50 The Power of Three
intended and any such similarity is purely coincidental. David J Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen
Nothing may be reproduced by any means in whole or
part without the written permission of the publishers.
James Walker were some of the programme’s
This periodical may not be sold, except by authorised best-known historians during the 1990s.
dealers, and is sold subject to the condition that it shall

54 Inside the Archives

not be sold or distributed with any part of its cover
or markings removed, nor in a mutilated condition.
All letters sent to this magazine will be considered As television Doctor Who entered a long hiatus,
for publication, but the publishers cannot be held
responsible for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs or the official magazine embarked on some
artwork. Newstrade distribution: Marketforce (UK) Ltd remarkably detailed retrospectives.
020 3148 3333. ISSN 0963-1275

4 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
 Main image:
David Tennant, Russell
T Davies and John Simm
with the first edition
of Russell’s 2008 book
The Writer’s Tale.
Opposite page below:
The Doctor’s name is
revealed on page 42 of
the very first reference
book about the series,
The Making of Doctor
Who (1972). This
algebraic moniker was
later seen in the Tomb
of Rassilon in The Five
Doctors (1983).

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 5 . .

 Through the
Magic Door
Its enigmatic title promises mystery – yet Doctor Who is perhaps
the most forensically documented TV series of all time.
FEATURE BY PAUL KIRKLEY

O
ver the years, Doctor Who Book (1975), trying to fathom the significance Special has certainly made the year for us
has borrowed liberally of a cable snaking out of the TARDIS console. Dr Who fans’. To these sacred texts, Jeremy
from such literary lions The significance being, of course, that it was Bentham would add the lesser known but
as Shakespeare, Lewis a rehearsal shot – and in 1975, we weren’t used equally groundbreaking TV Action Holiday
Carroll and JK Rowling. to seeing behind-the-scenes images of Doctor Specials, published by Polystyle between
But when it really Who. It wasn’t the sort of thing they printed on 1973 and 1977. The first of three issues
Opposite page: The mattered – in the climactic Weetabix cards and ice-lolly wrappers. mixed explosive comic-strip action with
Doctor (Matt Smith) moments of the show’s 50th Anniversary Whereas previous Doctor Who books, such features, a potted history of the show and
goes through the magic
door in A Christmas
Special, with the whole world watching in as 1964’s The Dalek Book and the World a fabulous behind-the-scenes look at the
Carol (2010). 96 countries across six continents – writer Distributors annuals, had expanded the making of the recently broadcast Frontier in
Below left: A spread
Steven Moffat reached for an even more series’ fictional world, The Making of Doctor Space (1973), presented as a pictorial strip in
from The Doctor Who seminal text: namely, the second edition of Who was – in the words of Jeremy Bentham, the style of those ‘photo love stories’ familiar
Monster Book showing The Making of Doctor Who by Terrance Dicks the man with as good a claim as any to being from the pages of Jackie and My Guy.
the mysterious cable (Target, 1976). For it was there that the Doctor Who’s original historian – “the first
that baffled the young former script editor first asserted that the time you really got an appreciation of
Mark Gatiss.
Doctor is ‘never cruel or cowardly’ and that the people who made the show”. “It
Below centre: The ‘he never gives in, and he never gives up’ – was the first book to reveal some of the
1973 TV Action Holiday
tenets underlined on screen by David Tennant magic under the covers,” agrees fellow
Special took an
exclusive look at the and John Hurt in The Day of the Doctor. Who scholar David J Howe. “As an
making of Frontier in Steven Moffat isn’t the only writer to have 11-year-old, it was the first time I realised
Space Episode Six. been inspired by that book and others like the show had scripts! It was fascinating.”
Below right: The Radio it. Neil Gaiman bought the first edition, The other foundation stone of Doctor
Times 10th anniversary co-written by Dicks and fellow Who script Who reference works was the Radio Times
special included veteran Malcolm Hulke, in 1972 and “read it 10th anniversary special, the ecstatic
behind-the-scene
a hundred times before my 13th birthday”. response to which was summed up by
features and interviews
with the show’s cast.  The young Mark Gatiss, meanwhile, would reader Peter Capaldi, 15, from Glasgow,
spend hours gazing at The Doctor Who Monster who wrote to RT to point out ‘your

6 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
“The Making of Doctor Who was
the first time you really got an
appreciation of the people who
made the show.” Jeremy Bentham
 Through the Magic Door
Right: Issues of
the Doctor Who
Appreciation Society’s
fanzine TARDIS from
1977 and April 1978;
plus the first issue of
its newsletter Celestial
Toyroom, from 1978.
Below:
Autobiographies by Tom
Baker, Elisabeth Sladen
and Peter Davison.
Bottom right:
In his memoir, The
Writer’s Tale, Russell
T Davies recalled being
asked to appear in
Dancing on Ice.

nothing of the Matrix Data Bank that is the

“All these publications were touchstones
that told you we’d reached a certain point
in the programme’s evolution,” says Jeremy.
“They were absolutely treasured, pored
over, multiple copies bought and stuck
into scrapbooks.”
Until this point, most Doctor Who fans had
lived innocently in the moment. How many
of us children of the 1970s even knew our
acquiring information about Doctor Who
became a serious matter, not least when
Bentham, Stephen Payne and Jan Vincent-
Rudzki founded the Doctor Who Appreciation
Society in 1976. The society’s magazine,
TARDIS, was the first to carry in-depth
interviews with such Who alumni as story
editor Gerry Davis and designer Barry
Newbery, while its Reference Department was
internet – to consult. But back in the day,
researching the show meant going, where
possible, direct to the horse’s mouth. By
1976 Bentham had struck up a symbiotic
relationship with Terrance Dicks, in which
they would trade information for their
respective projects. It was to Bentham that
Dicks applied for help with The Doctor Who
Monster Book that so beguiled the ten-year-old
Mark Gatiss.

hero used to look like Patrick Troughton, let
alone the names of the producer, director
and assistant floor manager? (Though we’d
heard of Terrance Dicks, of course – he’d
written half my local junior lending library.
The good half.)
But once the genie was out of the bottle,
there was no going back. In the late 1970s,
I
charged with answering members’ queries t was an imprecise science, though. While
like an early, SAE-powered version of Google. the interviews published in TARDIS and
“People would write in and ask things like, other fanzines, and testimony gleaned
how many times has the Doctor said ‘Reverse from panels at early Doctor Who conventions,
the polarity of the neutron flow?’” recalls were fertile sources of box-fresh knowledge,
Jeremy. Unfortunately he had no idea. the people involved could sometimes
These days, of course, Doctor Who scholars prove to be unreliable narrators. If they
have a whole forest of literature – to say misremembered something, or were prone to

In Their Own Words Baker? – as dementedly brilliant a showbiz

memoir as you will ever read. Peter Davison
and the late Elisabeth Sladen would later

I
n recent years, the story of Doctor Who
has been cast in a fresh light by the
growing number of autobiographies
coming from the show’s various luminaries.
The Fourth Doctor set the ball rolling two
decades ago with Who On Earth Is Tom
prove equally forthright in their recollections,
while everyone from K9 actor John Leeson
to 1980s script editor Andrew Cartmel have
gone on record with their version of events.
As for twenty-first century Who, the most
revealing account of the creative process
behind the revived series has to be The
Writer’s Tale (BBC Books, 2008). In this record
of a lengthy and, at times, unflinchingly
honest exchange of emails between
Russell T Davies and DWM journalist
Benjamin Cook, the then-showrunner
exposed the sometimes tortured and
despairing artist
behind the breezy,
garrulous exterior –
while also divulging
that he’d been
approached to appear
on ITV’s Dancing
on Ice, and that
Benny and Björn from
ABBA had expressed
interest in writing
a Torchwood musical.

8 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
a bit of creative embellishment, then you just
had to take their word for it.
From this tapestry of anecdotes and
opinions, scrapbook clippings and, if you
were really lucky, production paperwork,
the story of Doctor Who gradually began
to emerge from the fog. Enough, anyway,
for Jeremy Bentham to start expanding the
factual information in the nascent Doctor Who
Weekly (later Monthly) from some brief filler in
between the comic strips and free transfers
to the journal of record that Doctor Who
Magazine is today.
Of course, it wasn’t just the facts that
emerged. This was also the era in which
popular opinions and value judgements
about Doctor Who began to solidify. In the age
before videos, DVDs and downloads – when
we take it for granted we can watch The Tomb
of the Cybermen (1967) on the bus to work –
fans often looked to others to be told what to
think about certain Doctor Who stories.
And to an extent some of that
early opinion-forming still
holds sway today, though
Bentham insists they
weren’t so much shaping
views as reflecting them –
“soaking up opinion like
blotting paper,” as he puts it.
A new decade brought
the first Doctor Who Programme

This was the era in which

popular opinions and value
judgements began to solidify.
Guide (WH Allen, 1981), written by
Jean-Marc Lofficier, while producer
John Nathan-Turner – who in 1982
granted the likes of DWM access
to the BBC’s Script Unit – was now
calling on the services of superfan Ian
Levine as a quasi-official ‘continuity
adviser’ in order to feed, for good or
ill, fans’ growing knowledge of the
programme’s history back into the
show itself.

B
y that time, it was taken as read
that even the most casual fan (as
distinct from mere viewers) would
know at least some of the back story of
Doctor Who, while Nathan-Turner was
as regular a fixture on TV as his actors;
he even had his own “totally tasteless”
costume. Indeed, his very first days on
the job had been chronicled in a book,
Graham Rickard’s A Day with a TV
Producer (Wayland, 1980), that even turned
his dog, Pepsi, into a minor celebrity.
A couple of years later, young readers were
given a more lingering look behind the scenes
in Alan Road’s Doctor Who: The Making of
a Television Series (André Deutsch, 1982),
a detailed account of the production of
1982’s The Visitation, with an introduction
by Peter Davison.
In 1983, Doctor Who’s 20th birthday was
marked with two landmark publications
(three, if you counted Radio Times’ latest
discourses’ of Doctor Who through discussion
of such hot-button topics as Barthesian Top: A Day with
semiotics, Greimasian narrative models and a TV Producer turned
Bertolt Brecht’s theories of estrangement. JN-T’s dog, Pepsi, into
Published in early December, it must have a minor celebrity.
led to some very confused and disappointed Inset: Badges
encouraged younger
young faces on Christmas morning. A few
fans to read Doctor
years later, this book would also loop back Who books.
into the series itself when a line about ‘the
Above right: Alan
anniversary special). Peter Haining’s semiotic thickness of a performed text’ was Road’s Doctor Who:
A Celebration was the first mass-market used, tongue planted firmly in cheek, in The Making of
coffee-table book about Doctor Who, selling 1987’s Dragonfire. a Television Series
more than 100,000 copies, while at the The mid-1980s also gifted the world two looked at the
opposite end of the spectrum Doctor Who: of the maddest books in Doctor Who history. production of 1982’s
The Visitation.
The Unfolding Text was the first of many In The Doctor Who Pattern Book (WH Allen,
‘serious’ academic studies of the show. 1984), Joy Gammon provided instructions Left: The Radio Times
Doctor Who 20th
John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s and templates for everything from a knitted Anniversary Special,
weighty doorstop of a tome set out to Yeti to a natty K9 shoulder bag. Early published in 1983.
‘deconstruct the material practices and cosplayers could also run up Adric’s tunic,

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 9 . .

 Through the Magic Door
If you were the sort of fan who favoured
rare photographs, documents, production
sketches and blueprints of 1960s Doctor Who
over a full-page colour plate of director Fiona
Cumming tucking into a slice of Planet of
Fire Pudding, then you’d have been better
saving your pocket money for Doctor Who:
The Early Years (WH Allen, 1986). Jeremy
Bentham’s meticulous account of the show’s
creation and infancy was complemented
by extensive material from series designer
Right: The Doctor Who Raymond Cusick’s personal archive, ensuring
Pattern Book by Joy that it wasn’t just the (rather crudely cut-out)
Gammon included brain creatures of Morphoton whose eyes
this strangely sinister were out on stalks.
image of a Fifth
In 1988 actor David Banks – aka Doctor
Doctor-inspired jumper.
Who’s Cyber Leader – blended fact and fiction
Below: Gary Downie’s
in Cybermen (Who Dares Publishing) which,
Doctor Who Cookbook
was published in 1985 as well as telling the behind-the-scenes story
and offered recipes of the men from Mondas’ TV appearances,
for such delicacies as elaborated on their creation from the
Vickissoise Soup and viewpoint of an alien race called the ArcHivists.
The Kipper of Traken.
It’s bafflingly complex in places, with such
housekeeping information as: ‘The Five Doctors
Nyssa’s jacket and Tegan’s ‘boob tube’, as extended Who family into providing their is not Earth-based and is therefore classified
modelled in the book by what we can only favourite recipes, with opportunities Document 0, though its actual position in the
assume were friends, family and WH Allen for weak punning clearly taking priority over History is between Documents 7 and 8, and
staffers – 1980s mullets, ’taches and all. My any nutritional or culinary value. Hence Attack of the Cybermen is divided into its two
personal favourite is the guy wearing a knitted Patrick Troughton’s Vegetable Soup with chronologically distinct parts as Document 2
‘neon logo’ Doctor Who jumper and stick-on Dalek Krotons, Maureen O’Brien’s Vickissoise (Earth 1985) and Document 9 (Telos
felt celery, glowering murderously at the Soup and writer Johnny Byrne’s Kipper of post-Tomb).” Everyone clear on that? Good.
camera while emerging from the cab of a JCB. Traken. Barry Letts, meanwhile, provided The same year, Dalek creator Terry
And then there was the Doctor Who a dish whose ingredients – only to be found Nation teamed up with author John Peel for
Cookbook (WH Allen, 1985), in which the on Venus, apparently – included three ounces The Official Doctor Who and the Daleks Book
programme’s then-production manager, Gary of blim tree worms and ‘grated snadge, to (St Martin’s Press), which took a similar
Downie, corralled various members of the taste’. Probably best not to ask. approach to Banks’ Cybermen, albeit with
fewer flow charts. Peel adopted a fully
The programme’s then-production ‘in-universe’ approach for 1991’s The Gallifrey
Chronicles (Virgin Books), in which, among

manager, Gary Downie, corralled various other things, he reproduced The Scrolls
of Rassilon, allegedly penned by the Time

members of the extended Who family

Lords’ founding father himself. By then, of
course, Doctor Who was no longer a going
concern, meaning anyone writing about it

into providing their favourite recipes. was now a de facto historian – even when that
history was completely made up.

10 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
 The star turns of the Doctor Who reference
industry in the 1990s were David J Howe,
Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker,
whose large-format trilogy The Sixties, The
Seventies and The Eighties (Virgin Books, 1992,
1994, 1996) combined impressive primary
research with a wealth of photographic
material, much of it never seen before. The
Stage called the first volume ‘one of the best
books about television ever’, and Howe
puts its success down to “doing the legwork
– tracking down and speaking to as many
people as we could. If, for example, Bonnie
Langford said that JN-T did X or Y, then
don’t take her word for it – go and ask JN-T.”
Around the same time, the trio also authored
a series of seven Handbooks, one per Doctor,
on which they received the cover credit
Howe-Stammers-Walker, casting them as the
Doctor Who publishing equivalent of a 1970s
rock supergroup.
No less significant, in its way, was
Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith
Topping’s The Discontinuity Guide
(Virgin, 1995), which introduced
a welcome blast of irreverence –
highlighting the show’s ‘fluffs, goofs,
double entendres, fashion victims,
technobabble and dialogue disasters’
– to the often ponderous business of
Doctor Who scholarship. Indeed, Dave
Owen, DWM’s resident book reviewer
during this period, once likened
a particular author’s arid prose to
a policeman giving evidence from his
notebook in court.
Hot Gossip
T
he prize for the most
controversial Doctor
Who book of all time
surely goes to former DWM
scribe Richard Marson’s brilliant
but shocking JN-T: The Life
& Scandalous Times of John
Nathan-Turner (Miwk, 2013).
Redefining the phrase ‘warts
and all’, Marson’s biography
included a series of juicy
revelations that proved to be
tabloid catnip.
In an expanded edition
published last year as Totally
Tasteless: The Life of John
Nathan-Turner, Marson related
his own experiences in the eye
of this media storm, lamenting
the red-tops’ focus on a single
chapter (‘Hanky Panky’) of what
The Times called ‘the definitive
behind-the-scenes portrait of
the show in the 80s’.
History partwork. The clue to its ambition is
Top left:
in the title.
Author and former
Is it possible, though, that we might now DWM contributor
simply know too much about Doctor Who? Richard Marson.
By peeking behind the curtain, Wizard of Above right:
Oz-style, to investigate the pulleys and levers The controversial
clanking away to make the show, are we JN-T: The Life &
in danger of losing the magic? Especially Scandalous Times of
John Nathan-Turner
now we know where so many of the bodies
was first published
are buried. Once upon a happy time and in 2013.
place, Tom Baker was the pop-eyed hero of
Left: The Seventies was
Saturday teatimes; does it serve us to know the second part of an
he actually had such a volcanic temper that acclaimed trilogy by
a camera operator once tried to take him David J Howe, Mark
out with a mole crane, or to see out-takes of Stammers and Stephen

W
hen Philip Segal, producer
of the 1996 Doctor Who
TV Movie, and Gary
Russell collaborated on Regeneration
(HarperCollins, 2000), a brilliantly
readable celebration-cum-autopsy of
that turbulent production, it could easily
have stood as the postscript to the entire
story of Doctor Who. But history had
other ideas, of course, and the show’s
revival in 2005 brought with it an explosion
of new literature.
Much of this, gratifyingly, was aimed at
the fresh blood in the audience, who were
more interested in pictures of Sycorax and
Slitheen than learning about the day-to-day
life of the show’s producer or, indeed, his dog.
Hence Justin Richards’ colourful Monsters
and Villains/Aliens and Enemies series for BBC
Books, or the recent Penguin guides How to
be a Time Lord (2014), The Dangerous Book of
Monsters (2015) and this year’s The Companion’s
Companion, credited to one ‘Clara Oswald’.
There’s been no shortage of in-universe
titles for grown-ups, either, including such
coffee-table efforts as James Goss and Steve
Tribe’s A History of the Universe in 100 Objects
(BBC Books, 2012) and Justin Richards and
George Mann’s equally lavish The Whoniverse
(Penguin, 2016). Meanwhile, in A History (Mad
Norwegian Press, 2007 onwards), Lance Parkin
and Lars Pearson embarked on a sanity-testing
mission to order every event in the Doctor Who
multiverse – including spin-off media – into
a single coherent timeline. Pray for them.
The behind-the-scenes story of the show
is still occasionally given the big-budget
treatment, in BBC books like Clayton
him belly-aching about a “dreary prop” while James Walker.
Lalla Ward stands frozen in porcelain terror? Below: Regeneration
by Philip Segal and
For Jeremy Bentham, it’s all a question of
Gary Russell examined
“compartmentalising” so that “When you the 1996 TV Movie,
get to Saturday, you can still suspend your while The Brilliant
disbelief.” Plus, let’s not forget the process Book 2011 looked
can also be part of the magic; that the facts at the events of Matt
can fire our imaginations just as much as the Smith’s first series as
the Doctor.
fiction. David Tennant knew from an early
age that he didn’t want to be Doctor Who,
Hickman’s witty and inventive The Brilliant he wanted to play him. Similarly, Doctor
Book of Doctor Who (2010, 2011) and Marcus Who made Steven Moffat “interested in
Hearn’s bountiful 50th-anniversary treasure background stuff, how television was made”.
trove, The Vault (2013). The same goes for Russell T Davies, Neil
All these sources, and more (including Gaiman, Mark Gatiss and all those others
non-print ones, like the reliably brilliant who delighted in taking Doctor Who apart
documentaries on the BBC’s Doctor Who DVD so they could learn how to put it together
range), have contributed to giving us a deep, again. They wanted to know how the magic
rich and sometimes eye-opening insight into worked, so they could
the story of Doctor Who. But you’ll forgive me, make new magic. DWM
I hope, if I venture to suggest that
no single body has done more
to further that particular cause
than Doctor Who Magazine
itself – through its analysis, its
frequently candid interviews, and
in the painstaking research of
resident historians such as Jeremy
Bentham and Andrew Pixley. An
honourable mention, in particular,
to Pixley’s series of Doctor by
Doctor (and, latterly, series by
series) specials. Together, these add
up to the most forensically detailed
record of the show ever published,
and are currently being revised
and expanded upon for Panini/
Hachette’s handsome The Complete

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 11 . .

THE
An imminent
production handover
prompted story editor

HISTORY
Dennis Spooner to
create the first Doctor
Who episode guide.
FEATURE BY CHRIS BENTLEY

OF
DOCTOR
WHO
E
arly in May 1965, as the
opening episodes of The Chase
were being recorded, the
Doctor Who production
office was preparing for
a major change in personnel.
Original producer Verity
Lambert would be leaving the series in August
to oversee the launch of a new twice-weekly
soap opera, The Newcomers, and story editor
Dennis Spooner had accepted a position as
head writer on The Baron, a colour film series
due to start shooting at Elstree Studios in July.
To assist their replacements, Spooner
penned a three-page document titled ‘The
History of Doctor Who’ that outlined the 19
Doctor Who serials produced or commissioned
to date, listing each story by production code
together with the author’s name and the
number of parts it comprised. Entirely unaware
of the document’s significance to cultural
historians of the future, Spooner had just
written Doctor Who’s first formal episode guide.
A former comedy sketch writer who had
graduated to serious drama with scripts
for Coronation Street, No Hiding Place and
The Avengers, Dennis Spooner was a regular
writer on Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5
and Stingray series when he was invited to
contribute to Doctor Who, as he told Doctor
Who Monthly in 1981.
“I went along to see [story editor] David
Whitaker and he said they were planning
to do some historical stories and some
science-fiction,” he recalled, “but really they
had got all the science-fiction ones so would
“With the second series of Doctor
Who we knew that whatever we
could establish would make the
boundaries for a long time to come.”
I do one of the historicals? He gave me a list
of about four possible subjects and I went
away to the local library, did a bit of reading
and said I would like to do one on the
French Revolution. And that was how
I came into Doctor Who.”
The success of The Reign of Terror resulted
in a permanent position on the series and
Spooner replaced Whitaker as story editor in
November 1964, during production of the
second series. He assumed the role for the
season’s third serial, The Rescue (1965), but was
only credited as story editor from the opening
instalment of the fifth, The Web Planet (1965).
“After the first series we realised that the
show was destined to run a long time,” he
recalled. “And in a television show you have
to learn very quickly what you are going to
get away with, because once it becomes at
all established then you cannot change it.
With the second series of Doctor Who we
knew that whatever we could establish would
make the boundaries for a long time to
come. The Romans was done for comedy and
in The Web Planet we wanted to see how far
we could go with being weird.”
Having already experienced the transition
process himself, when it came to handing
his duties over to incoming story editor
Donald Tosh, Spooner knew that some
sort of short reference guide to all
the previous serials would prove
invaluable. The production office
retained copies of the earlier scripts
and sets of general and episodic
synopses prepared by BBC Television
Enterprises, the corporation’s overseas
sales department, but this paperwork
was too cumbersome for the purposes
of planning forthcoming stories.
If a writer proposed a story set on
an interstellar colony ship, it was
impractical for the story editor to
start checking through all the scripts
and synopses to find out if this
would duplicate the setting of an
earlier serial.
S
pooner opened his guide
with some general notes that
would help Tosh and the new
producer, John Wiles, to navigate
potential pitfalls in the series’
general continuity. He highlighted
the three serials to date that had
referenced Earth’s future – The
Sensorites (1964), The Dalek Invasion
of Earth (1964) and The Rescue – and
pointed out that any commissioned
stories with a future setting
would need to be checked against
these to avoid any chronological
discrepancies. Similarly, he also
highlighted the various Dalek
serials, noting that the Dalek race
was wiped out in their first story,
The Mutants (aka The Daleks, 1963-64), and
that the subsequent Dalek stories were set
at an earlier point in Dalek history. Any
forthcoming serials would therefore need
to be checked against The Dalek Invasion
of Earth, The Chase (1965) and Mission to
the Unknown (1965) so as to remain true
to the Dalek ‘calendar’.
Next, Spooner addressed the issue
of the name of the lead character,
as portrayed by William Hartnell.
‘Another further note,’ he wrote,
‘is that most writers call Doctor
Who “Doctor Who”. In fact he
does not admit to this name,
just the “Doctor” part, and is
never referred to as “Doctor
Who”. This is just the title
of the show.’ Nonetheless,
Opposite page: William
Hartnell as the Doctor in The
Reign of Terror. This 1964
story was Dennis Spooner’s
first script for Doctor Who.
Top right: The first page of
the Spooner’s Doctor Who
episode guide.
Right: Dennis Spooner,
pictured in the early 1980s.
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 13
. .
 The History of Doctor Who
T
he guide that followed these notes
offered what Spooner described as
‘a thumbnail sketch of the serials
transmitted and/or commissioned for Doctor
Who’. Each serial was briefly summarised in
three or four lines, highlighting the setting
and any salient features of the story. Each
serial was listed only by its production code,
rather than by a specific title for the serial
as a whole, with just one exception: Serial
E, written by Terry Nation and broadcast
in 1964, was named as The Keys of Marinus
within the plot summary.
The series’ opening story received more
coverage in Spooner’s précis than the
subsequent serials. Headed ‘Serial A: written

‘Doctor Who comes from a planet

by Anthony Coburn’, the synopses split the
Above left: The story into two distinct sections. ‘The first
destruction of the

that has never been named.

episode dealt with Doctor Who and Susan
Daleks in The Rescue,
the final episode of
landing in present day England and collecting
Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. They left
Various references have been
The Mutants (aka The
Daleks, 1963-64).  the present day for a three-part adventure in
Above right: Peter pre-historic times (100,000 B.C.) in a story
Purves’ character
Steven Taylor was
referred to as Michael
made to it in the scripts...’ that dealt with the discovery of fire and the
rivaling [sic] in tribes.’
Several of the summaries provided brief
in Spooner’s notes.
Spooner consistently referred to Hartnell’s (William Russell) and Barbara Wright production information which Spooner
Below: BBC Television character as Doctor Who throughout the (Jacqueline Hill) were being written out of clearly felt would be pertinent to Tosh and
Play Synopses for ‘Dr
Who and the Pandora
guide, doing so, for example, in the very next the programme at the end of The Chase, so Wiles. The Keys of Marinus was ‘devised to
Box’ (broadcast as The paragraph when discussing the character’s Spooner simply noted that background for cover holidays for the cast’ and Planet of
Mind of Evil in 1971), home planet. ‘Doctor Who comes from a Vicki (Maureen O’Brien) could be found Giants (1964) was a four-part story ‘that was
‘Dr Who and the Claws planet that we have never named. Various in The Rescue and that a new character, subsequently edited down to three parts’.
of Axon’ (broadcast as references to it have been made in the scripts tentatively called Michael, was to be The Romans (1965) was described as an
The Claws of Axos in
1971), The Leisure Hive
as the show has gone along, but I personally introduced in the sixth episode of The Chase adventure ‘in Nero’s Rome, accented on
(1980) and The Last have not gone back looking for them all.’ and further developed in The Time Meddler comedy’ and Mission to the Unknown was
Zolfa-Thuran (broadcast Spooner’s final note provided references (1965). This was the character that was ‘a one part Dalek cut-away involving none
as Meglos in 1980). for the background to the Doctor’s friends. ultimately named Steven Taylor and played of our principals, which is in fact a trailer
Longstanding companions Ian Chesterton by Peter Purves. for the Dalek serial planned for November/
December of this year’. Within the next
20 years, facts like these would become part

DOCTOR WHO FOR THE DEAF of the established Doctor Who lore, but in
1965 there was no readily available resource

B
efore the introduction that bore little resemblance to resource for researchers, offering
(from September 1974) the finished programmes. In an insight into the development
of subtitling on BBC later years, however, the RNID of many Doctor Who serials.
programmes via the corporation’s sheets represented a fascinating
Ceefax teletext information
service, the BBC worked closely
with the Royal National Institute
for Deaf People (RNID) to publish
free advance synopses of selected
dramas in order to help deaf
viewers understand what they
were seeing when the programmes
were broadcast. The availability of
new synopses was advertised in
Radio Times two or three weeks
in advance of the broadcast dates
and viewers could then write to
the RNID requesting the relevant
sheets to be sent by return post.
Doctor Who synopses for the
deaf were first offered in the
Radio Times dated 7-13 December
1963, covering the seven episodes
of the first Dalek serial; synopses
were apparently not available for
100,000 BC (aka An Unearthly
Child). Unfortunately for users, the
story descriptions were written in
advance of recording, often using
working titles and early drafts of
storylines, resulting in summaries

14 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
that production newcomers could turn to for
DENNIS SPOONER including The Baron, Man in a Suitcase,
The Champions, Department S, Randall
and Hopkirk (Deceased), Jason King

this kind of information.
The extent to which ‘The History of
Doctor Who’ proved useful to Donald Tosh
and John Wiles may never be known. There
was certainly no repetition of settings or
storylines during their relatively short time
on the programme, but this may have had
more to do with the pair’s attempts to forge
a new direction for the series.
“I had to steer the scripts through
a period of transition,” Donald Tosh recalled
in 1992. “Up until then there were basically
two different kinds of stories which had been
done: the historical stories set in the past and
the science-fantasy stories set in the future.
I wanted to blur that distinction and The Time
Meddler was our first attempt to mix the two.”
I
n addition to his story editor
duties for much of the second
series (The Rescue to The Chase),
Dennis Spooner was also the author
of The Reign of Terror, The Romans,
The Time Meddler and six episodes
of The Daleks’ Master Plan. He
later penned an uncredited rewrite
of David Whitaker’s scripts for The
Power of the Daleks (1966).
Spooner’s subsequent BBC
scripts included episodes of
Paul Temple, Doomwatch and
Bergerac but he was more
extensively employed
by Lew Grade’s ITC (Incorporated
Television Company) on many popular
filmed action series,
and The Adventurer. His earlier work
for Gerry Anderson on Fireball XL5
and Stingray led to commissions on
Anderson’s Thunderbirds, UFO and
The Protectors series as well as
linking material for a Space:1999
compilation feature, Alien Attack.
Spooner also contributed to
episodes of Thriller, The New
Avengers, The Professionals,
Hammer House of Mystery and
Suspense and Remington
Steele. He died suddenly
in September 1986,
aged just 53.

I
n 1983 John Wiles told Doctor Who
Monthly: “Donald Tosh was wonderfully
mercurial in mind and very erudite. He
knew his sources and had very firm ideas about
where he felt we ought to be going with the
programme. We were looking for an avenue
into serious science-fiction. At that time there
were a tremendous number of very exciting
things going on in fields like space exploration
and I felt that we were missing important
ingredients in our work by concentrating too
much on this child-like fantasy.”
The surviving documentation gives no
indication that ‘The History of Doctor Who’
was ever updated. Dennis Spooner’s guide
ended at Serial DC, Mission to the Unknown,
without even mentioning that the planned
Dalek serial he referenced there was to be
a huge 12-part story, The Daleks’ Master Plan
(1965-66), co-written by Spooner, Terry
Nation and an uncredited Donald Tosh. When
Tosh was himself replaced by Gerry Davis in
January 1966, the incoming story editor had
ideas of his own about how to avoid repetition
and preserve continuity with the earlier serials.
Speaking to the Doctor Who Appreciation
Society fanzine TARDIS in 1978, Davis
revealed that “As soon as I got onto
Doctor Who, I got all the scripts
from the past three years. I’d seen a lot of
Doctor Who and I thought I was inheriting
a tradition. What I did was to set up a story
board which incidentally survived for many
years. I took one whole wall and got one
representative still from each story and
pinned them up. Underneath each one was
a précis of the storyline. So when I had
a writer in the office we could check at a
glance if something had been done before.”
Davis’ photo board proved an effective
method for the production team to keep track
of each Doctor Who story and was continuously
updated throughout the tenures of
successive producers Innes Lloyd,
Peter Bryant, Derrick Sherwin and
Barry Letts. When Davis returned Top: Jason King
to the production office in 1974 (Peter Wyngarde)
in the first series of
to discuss his scripts for ‘Return
Department S and
of the Cybermen’ (subsequently Lt Gay Ellis (Gabrielle
retitled Revenge of the Cybermen) Drake) in UFO.
with producer Philip Hinchcliffe Inset: Donald Tosh
and script editor Robert Holmes, took over from Dennis
he was surprised to find that the board Spooner as Doctor
was still in use. Who’s story editor.
But by this time, a variety of other Far left and below:
resources were becoming available thanks to The second and third
the professional publication of production pages of Spooner’s
guide, with story
information, episode guides and other forms synopses from the
of reference material. The history of Doctor series’ first two years.
Who would never be the same again. DWM

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 15 . .

 Mac Books The seminal Making of Doctor Who was published
divided his career between writing episodes of television
T
he late Malcolm ‘Mac’
Hulke is remembered
as one of Doctor Who’s
most significant
scriptwriting talents
of the late 1960s and
early 70s – and as the
author of many of the very best Target
Books novelisations. Alongside the series’
then-script editor, his protégé-turned-
collaborator Terrance Dicks, Hulke co-wrote
The War Games (1969), which at last revealed
who the Doctor really was (a Time Lord),
and why he spent his time messing about in
the fourth and fifth dimensions (he’d stolen
a TARDIS, and left his home planet in
search of kicks). He invented the Silurians,
the sleeping Earth reptiles deposed by Man,
and brought social and political subtext to
the Doctor’s adventures, too – exploring,
for example, xenophobia in the Silurians
16 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE
. .
in 1972. Its co-author was Malcolm Hulke, a man who
series and compiling guide books...
FEATURE BY ALAN BARNES
stories, and Cold War sabre-rattling in
Frontier in Space (1973).
Hulke broke new ground in another way,
though, when he dreamed up The Making
of Doctor Who (Piccolo, 1972) – the first
book devoted entirely to the programme’s
production. As his co-author Dicks recalled,
many years later: “He was always looking
for… a scheme, or a project. And he loved
doing things like guides and directories,
and that kind of thing. He said to me,
‘Why don’t we do a book – a sort of guide
to Doctor Who…?’”
Priced 25p for 140 pages – at a time
when Doctor Who-headlining comic
TV Action + Countdown cost 5p per week,
and that year’s Doctor Who Annual would
cost all of 70p – the first, paperback-only
edition of The Making of Doctor Who had a
Sea Devil sneaking up on the Third Doctor
on its front cover, and a back cover blurb
“He was always looking
for… a scheme, or a
project. And he loved
doing things like guides
and directories.” Terrance Dicks
that asserted: ‘What happens in Doctor Who
often seems impossible. But is it? Could it
all be true?’
Evidently, the title owed its genesis
to Stephen E Whitfield and Gene
Roddenberry’s rather more substantial
The Making of Star Trek (Ballantine Books,
1968) – and something of its structure, too:
both contained chapters called ‘Inside a
Television Studio’, for example. But whereas
The Making of Star Trek filled many of its
400-plus pages by reproducing internal
Desilu Productions memoranda, The Making
of Doctor Who chose not to dwell on the
minutiae of TARDIS console design. In fact,
its opening account of the programme’s
origins was distinctly rose-tinted – claiming,
for example, that the sheer enthusiasm
of founding producer Verity Lambert had
inspired the BBC Design Department to
make ‘futuristic-looking weapons and
machines at the lowest possible cost… out
of Cellophane and bits and pieces of gauze,
using things which had been left over from
other shows’!
That wasn’t the only, er, ‘creative truth’
to be found in The Making of Doctor Who’s
pages. We were told that at the height
of the 1960s Dalek craze, ‘the demand
for Dalek toys was so great that in some
shops they went “under the counter”. This
term comes from the Second World War
when it was very difficult to buy certain
things, and shopkeepers used to keep Opposite page
above: Malcolm Hulke
them “under the counter” for their regular pictured in 1963.
customers…’ (Which conjures up images Photo © Studiocanal.
of 1960s Woolworths managers giving Opposite page
Christmas-shopping housewives a sly below: The first edition
wink, murmuring: “Got something special of Malcom Hulke and
in today, Mrs Brown. Dalek Rolykins. Terrance Dicks’ seminal
Don’t look round, everyone’ll want one…”) book The Making of
Doctor Who.
Hulke and Dicks were also responsible
for popularising one particular myth that Below: A publicity shot
of Patrick Troughton as
‘missing episodes’ obsessives still cling to the Doctor on the set
today – the idea that since television signals of The War Games, the
‘travel on into Space possibly for ever’, then: 1969 serial written by
‘Quite possibly somewhere in Outer Space… Hulke and Dicks.
some strange creature is watching the first
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 17 . .
 Mac Books
Right: Polly (Anneke
Wills) confronts a
Cyberman in The Tenth
Planet (1966). The
Making of Doctor Who
mistakenly stated that
the Cybermen had
made their début in
a later story.
Far right: The Doctor
(William Hartnell)
tells Ian Chesterton
(William Russell) about
strange birds wheeling
in another sky in The
Cave of Skulls, the
second episode of
100,000 BC (aka An
Unearthly Child, 1963).
Below: Hulke’s Writers
Guides from 1968-69
and 1970. episode of Doctor Who as you read this Doctor overloaded their computer with his There’s little doubt that The Making of
page…’ (Give over: that ‘strange creature’ intelligence and it exploded…’ Doctor Who defined much of the vocabulary
might be able to detect the existence of the And some of it was beautifully wrong. used to describe the series ever after: ‘Perhaps
signal carrying Fury from the Deep, but it’d be According to Hulke and Dicks: ‘In one of [the programme’s] success is to do with
too diffuse to watch.) the stories written by David Whitaker, the that special Doctor Who magic…’ (Oh, that
Some of The Making of Doctor Who Doctor said: “Can you imagine silver leaves indefinable ‘magic’!) And no-one before had
was fanciful, then. Some of its ‘facts’ got waving above a pool of liquid gold containing given a chronological listing of the Doctor’s
overlooked, when they might easily have been singing fishes? Twin suns that circle and adventures. Interestingly, and probably
adopted into Doctor Who mythology – viz fall in a rainbow heaven, another world in wisely, the authors didn’t give story titles
the story of the Brigadier’s military lineage: another sky? If you like to come with me [sic], for most of those adventures, but tabulated
‘Major General Fergus Lethbridge Stewart I’ll show you all this – and it will be, I promise individual serials by their production codes,
was one of the Duke of Wellington’s right- you, the dullest part of it all. Come with me and ‘The Enemies’ featured therein – eg: C,
hand men at the Battle of Waterloo. Other and you will see wonders that no Human ‘Space’; D, ‘War Lord Noghai’; H, ‘French
members of the Brigadier’s family have been has ever dreamt possible. Or stay behind and revolutionaries and aristocrats’; J, ‘Mad giant
in every major battle we’ve ever had since regret your staying until the day you die.”’ scientist’ (!). Instead of dry synopses, the
then…’ Some of its facts were simply wrong – This was probably a version of the Doctor’s authors delivered the Doctor’s story so far in
the claim that ‘The Cybermen first appeared speech in The Cave of Skulls, the second episode faux-document form – as secret Time Lord
on television on 11 February 1967 in a Doctor of Anthony Coburn’s 100,000 BC (1963) – “If files given at his post-War Games trial (in
Who story set on the Moon’, for example; you could touch the alien sand and hear the which the Doctor’s real name was given as ‘a
and that, in the Land of Fiction, the Second cries of strange birds and watch them wheel in mathematical formula’), then as memoranda
Doctor met ‘The Mind Robbers’ – who another sky…” – but quite where the authors from the Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart to
‘wanted to keep the Doctor there, but the got it from, nobody knows. UNIT HQ in Geneva.

GUIDING THE WAY

A
s Terrance Dicks attested, Malcolm Press, 1977) – a guide to ‘nearly 300 of the cheaper
Hulke authored a number of guides residential conference venues around Britain’,
and directories throughout his writing according to The Times.
career. By 1972, he’d already compiled and edited Thanks to Simon Guerrier
two editions of The Writers Guide, a handbook
published by the writers’ trade union, the Writers’
Guild of Great Britain. This was almost certainly
commissioned by Doctor Who’s first story editor,
David Whitaker, who chaired the Guild between
29 October 1966 and 26 May 1968. Hulke and
Whitaker knew one another well; indeed, Whitaker
had considered two Hulke story ideas as possibles
for the programme’s first season.
Whitaker enthusiastically endorsed the first
Guide, and its editor, in the Guild newsletter:
‘In other walks of life Malcolm Hulke would be
Canonised, knighted, or awarded four comely
maidens and twenty oxen…’ The 1968-69 Guide
contained sections on censorship and craftsmanship;
the 1970 Guide focused heavily on markets for
writing, and included a number of cautionary ‘Case
Histories’ described by Whitaker.
In later years, Hulke would put together reference
works including Cassell’s Parliamentary Directory
(1975) – ‘a godsend to the large number of
pressure groups which make a habit of bombarding
MPs’, reckoned The Economist; and the doubtless
indispensible Bring Your Own Towel (Bedford Square

18 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
There’s little doubt that The
Making of Doctor Who defined
much of the vocabulary used to
describe the series ever after.
No-one, either, had documented the
production of an individual Doctor Who serial
before. The chapter ‘Diary of a Production’
detailed the making of the Hulke-scripted
The Sea Devils (1972) in stages – from
conception to transmission – and reproduced
several pages of original script documents:
the first page of Hulke’s storyline, a scene
breakdown of the end of Episode One, and
a corresponding page from the rehearsal
script. When The Making of Doctor Who was
reissued, much rewritten and updated, by
Target Books in 1976, the ‘Diary’ section
focused instead on Terrance Dicks’ Robot
(1974-75). Script development would make
up a larger part of Hulke’s next, and arguably
most important, non-fiction work: Writing for
Television in the 70’s (A & C Black, 1974).
B
eginning in 1972, display ads for
an outfit called The Writing School
began to appear in the classifieds in
The Times and The Economist: ‘You can
learn to write for television and
radio in your spare time with
Malcolm Hulke, editor of “The
Writers Guide” and writer
of “Doctor Who”. Earn top
money selling your work
through The International
Script Agency with literary
contacts in many leading
cities’ – those cities being
‘Paris, Rome, New York, Zurich,
Buenos Aires’, among others. For
a free brochure, all one had to do was
write to 125 Parkway, London NW1 – or
one could call a ‘7-day, 24-hour answering
service’. This, then, was another of Hulke’s
schemes – a correspondence course that
ran until at least 1975. Doubtless much of
Hulke’s teaching made its way into Writing for
Television, which promised to ‘take you step by
step through television writing techniques’.
Many of Hulke’s Doctor Who comrades
contributed to the book: Dicks, of course,
but also Cybermen co-creator Gerry
Davis, The Faceless Ones co-author David
Ellis, fellow scriptwriter Robert Holmes,
1970s producer Barry Letts, The Mind
Robber author Peter Ling and 1960s script
editor Dennis Spooner, who made the
observation: “Maybe we do have
only seven plots… because there
are only seven deadly sins, and all
the world understands them.”
This wasn’t a dry, purely
practical tome; and it predated
the vogue for motivational jargon.
Discussing literary agents, for
example, Hulke offered this:
‘Writers have a predilection for
nervous disorders, divorces,
domestic upheavals and suicide.
There isn’t much an agent can do
about suicides, except organise the
Top left: Nicholas
burial (and that’s been known to Courtney (as the
happen). But for anything less final, Brigadier), Elisabeth
a good agent steps in like a Sladen (as Sarah
guardian angel…’ Jane Smith) and Tom
The second half of Baker (as the Doctor)
rehearse a scene
Writing for Television from the first episode
was given over to of Robot (1974-75).
extracts from real The production was
television scripts, analysed in the
with commentary second edition of The
Making of Doctor Who,
from Hulke and
published in 1976.
others – among
Top right: Hulke’s
them the first few
Writing for Television in
pages of Robert the 70’s was reprinted
Holmes’ Carnival of Monsters (1973), find much of interest still in Hulke’s chapters a number of times.
which prompted Holmes to confess on dialogue (‘Avoid lines like “A silly sort Above right: This
his belief that ‘Doctor Who releases a writer of situation” or any other systematically advertisement for
from his normal mental straitjacket. He can, sustained sequence of several similar- Hulke’s writing school
for once, leave the padded cell of reality and sounding sibilants. Lines like that can be very appeared in The Times.
fantasise through eternal time and space…’ difficult for an actor to deliver convincingly’) Far left: Shirna (Cheryl
Inevitably, some of Writing for Television is and characterisation (always Hulke’s Hall) and Vorg (Leslie
Dwyer) in Carnival
now obsolete – now that the multi-camera strongest suit). Revised and reprinted at least
of Monsters (1973).
studio drama is the exception, not the rule; three times, Writing for Television guided and Extracts from the script
and that Final Draft, Scrivener and other influenced more than one generation of TV appeared in Writing for
apps lay out umpteen different script formats scriptwriters… no doubt including Hulke’s Television in the 70’s.
automatically. But the apprentice writer will successors on Doctor Who. DWM
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 19 . .
Special Occasion
Who was celebrated with
BBC’s listings magazine,
n a world teeming with Doctor
I
Who-related publications and
episode guides of all kinds,
both in print and online,
it may be difficult to fully
comprehend the impact
made by the Radio Times 10th
anniversary special. The 68-page magazine
appeared on 11 December 1973, just
In 1973 the 10th
anniversary of Doctor
a souvenir issue of the
Radio Times.
FEATURE BY
JOHN J JOHNSON
days before the transmission of The Time
Warrior Part One. Yet, for all its subsequent
influence, this remarkable publication
almost didn’t happen.
The special’s editor, David Driver, had
been art director of Radio Times since 1969.
As an avowed fan of Doctor Who he had long
supported the series within the publication,
increasing its visibility through specially
commissioned covers – five during Jon
Pertwee’s tenure – and engaging inventive
artists such as Frank Bellamy and Peter
Brookes. Although Doctor Who’s 10th
anniversary had been commemorated on
television by The Three Doctors (1972-73) and
on newsstands by the accompanying Radio
Times cover for the 30 December 1972 edition,
Driver was keen to produce a stand-alone
anniversary publication. Initially dismissed
by colleagues and superiors alike, Driver
drew attention to the ten-year-old series’
remarkably healthy viewing figures and,
consequently, a budget was found.
In a 1995 interview with Doctor Who
Magazine, Driver remembered planning
the layout and style of the publication in the
memorable surroundings of a Parisian hotel
room. True to his training and expertise,
he stated that “If it’s in a magazine format,
then it must have strong visual elements
going through it and, after all, Doctor Who is
very visual.”
Driver decided on the three coloured zones
– red, green and blue – which would comprise
the individual sections of each Doctor’s
episode guide and the accompanying
companion interviews. He also instructed
Peter Brookes to use the same colours for
his line-drawings of the regenerating Doctor
spread across pages 6 and 7, illustrating brief
interviews with the three leading actors.
This episode guide provided the main core
of the publication, as Driver appreciated
the importance of documenting the
series’ broadcast history at a time before
regular repeats or affordable home video
systems. The concept of chronologically
listing televised adventures had only been
rudimentarily attempted in Piccolo’s
The Making of Doctor Who, published in April
1972. Unfortunately for the Radio Times
special, story titles from the first serial,
100,000 BC (aka An Unearthly Child, 1963),
to The Gunfighters (1966), were substantially
flawed. Driver recalled, “I did try so hard to
ensure it was accurate but I do remember
that all of the [early] scripts had the
individual episode titles, not the full story
titles, on them. I didn’t discover this until it
was too late… It was very frustrating; I didn’t
want to get that sort of thing wrong, simply
because it was so easy to get right.”
It was evident that Driver’s researcher had
no real understanding of Doctor Who or its
format: the synopses vacillate between ‘the
Doctor’ and ‘Dr Who’, ‘Tardis’ and ‘the Tardis’.
A brief synopsis of the six-episode story
The Web Planet (1965) is substantially shorter
than that of the two-episode The Rescue from
the same year, while a slight synopsis of the
six-episode Dalek story The Chase (also 1965)
“If it’s in a magazine format, then it must have
strong visual elements going through it, and
after all, Doctor Who is very visual.” David Driver
is strangely preoccupied with Steven Taylor’s
plight on the planet Mechanus. Nevertheless,
in his desire for completeness Driver included
titles and synopses for the forthcoming
1973-74 season, a determined first that served
to whet the public’s appetite.
T
he Radio Times special was an
important step in recording the
Doctor’s television history and in
making a wealth of largely unseen archival
photographic material available to fans and
the general public, supplemented by specially
shot photographs of companions, old and
new. Driver recalled, “I thought it was
terribly important that they have a continuity
in terms of style, form, shape and colour.”
To ensure this, he engaged fashion and
rock photographer Allan Ballard, whose
internationally renowned work included
images of The Kinks, Twiggy, and Frank
Sinatra and Mia Farrow following their
marriage in 1967. His later works would
capture the zeitgeist of the 1970s and 80s,
with impressive shots of such diverse stars
as Bob Marley and Debbie Harry. Driver
recalled Ballard’s shooting of the publication’s
astonishing wraparound cover as “a challenge,
but it was great being there, trying to make
that work. We had to keep checking and
redesigning the whole picture through the
camera frame so that it all made sense.”
Driver engaged experienced Radio Times
contributor David Gillard to conduct the
interviews with cast and crew, past and Opposite page above:
present. Gillard was perhaps an obvious
The wraparound
choice for the commission, having written cover for the Radio
an article on the Radiophonic Workshop for Times special featured
the 27 September 1973 edition of the Radio photography by
Allan Ballard.
Times. Gillard is a respected opera critic
and continues to contribute regularly to the Opposite page
below: Nicholas
publication. In 2008 he was awarded an MBE Courtney (who played
for services to journalism and charity. the Brigadier) and
Some 250,000 copies of the Radio Times Caroline John (who had
special were printed. They flew off the shelves played Liz Shaw) posed
into the hands of thrilled Doctor Who fans, with Bessie for one
of the special’s many
confirming Driver’s faith in the project. While
exclusive photos.
the magazine’s contents were eventually
Above: Highlights of
superseded, the quality, tenor and layout of
the magazine included
this groundbreaking publication went on brand-new images,
to inform the Radio Times Doctor Who 20th including this shot of
Anniversary Special and explicitly inspired Carole Ann Ford at
DWM’s 30th anniversary special. The original Crystal Palace, and a
detailed episode guide.
special was even accorded a Radio Times
reprint on high-quality paper in 2003, Below: Peter
Brookes’ colour-coded
30 years after its first appearance. This
illustration of the
colourful, groundbreaking magazine remains three Doctors.
a landmark of Doctor Who publishing. DWM
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 21 . .
The long tradition of highly illustrated Doctor Who reference books can be
traced back to a treasured series edited by Terrance Dicks in the 1970s.

FEATURE BY
ALISTAIR McGOWN
 T
arget Books was launched
in May 1973 and its Doctor
Who novelisations quickly
became its best sellers.
Resident editor Richard
Henwood had established
a key contact in Doctor
Who’s script editor Terrance Dicks, who wrote
some of the earliest novelisations. Then, on
Dicks’ departure from the TV series in spring
1974, he became something of a consultant
for Target’s Doctor Who output. “At the
beginning it was on an unofficial basis,” he
recalls, “but once they were needing books
more quickly than I had time to write myself,
I was able to find other authors for them.”
In the midst of all this, The Doctor Who
Monster Book would be Target’s first non-
fiction title. “I think it was my idea to do
it,” says Terrance. He certainly had prior
experience of writing non-fiction about the
series, having compiled Piccolo’s The Making
of Doctor Who with Malcolm Hulke in 1972,
a book revised and reprinted by Target four
years later.
Richard Henwood departed Target in
May 1974, so it’s likely his replacement,
Michael Glover, handled the development of

Priced at 50 pence, The

The Doctor Who Monster Book through 1975.
Issued on 20 November, it quickly gained
a reputation as something of a milestone. For
a generation of fans who’d missed Piccolo’s
Making of, or the briefly available 1973
Radio Times special, this was the bible. It
was generously illustrated with blow-ups of
Target cover art and black-and-white photos,
at a time when archive Doctor Who stills were
hardly ever seen. Indeed, in 2017 Mark Gatiss
told Doctor Who Magazine that the book
seemed so important “because there was
nothing else!”
How did Terrance set about researching
the book? “I went in and looked up the
files in the BBC production office to see
what looked most interesting,” he explains,
“and then got the scripts out if I wanted
to go further.” His continued access to the
production office reference files proved vital,
Doctor Who Monster Book
was a huge success, selling
out its 100,000 copies
within a couple of years.
although it’s worth remembering that the
previous five years’ worth of files – around 45
per cent of the show’s history to that point –
would have been generated by Dicks himself
as script editor.
The book’s 64 pages covered the show’s
beginnings, the incarnations of the then four
Doctors, synopses of every Dalek serial up to
Genesis of the Daleks (1975)
and similar details of each
Cyberman serial. Other
monsters chronicled ran up
to Terror of the Zygons, which
had aired less than three
months before publication.
The book’s designer was Tandem’s first
art director Brian Boyle, who back in 1973
had brought in the Cyprus-born Christos
Achilleos as Doctor Who ‘house’ cover
artist. After a brief sabbatical in 1975,
Achilleos returned to Doctor Who and
among his new works was the Monster Opposite page: Chris
Book’s montage cover. A free pull-out Achilleos’ memorable
poster of the cover art was duly pinned to cover art for The Doctor
thousands of fans’ walls. Who Monster Book.
Priced at 50 pence, The Doctor Who Top: ‘The worst came
Monster Book was a huge success, selling first!’ The Daleks
out its print run of 100,000 copies within invade London in
the Monster Book.
a couple of years. A sequel seemed an
obvious proposition. Above centre: Writer
Terrance Dicks, pictured
Michael Glover left Target in early in 1974.
1976, making way for Elizabeth Godfray,
Above: Artist Chris
who, Dicks surmises, was probably the Achilleos in the
initiator of The Second Doctor Who Monster mid-1970s.
Book. Godfray, however, moved on after Left: The front and
a year, so this second title was likely seen back covers to the
through to production by her temporary first edition of The
replacement, Fanny Torrance. The book’s Doctor Who Monster
designer, Dom [Domenico Benito] Rodi, Book. The back showed
16 of the Target Books
was assisted by Liz Laczynska. Rodi had novelisations available
become Target’s art director, aged 26, in at the time.
late 1975 after a WH Allen takeover.

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 23 . .

 MONSTER MASH

Above: Spreads on the

1975 stories Pyramids
The second Monster Book was published
on 20 October 1977, just as The Invisible Unashamedly a children’s book,
its episode guide is written by
of Mars and Revenge Enemy aired on television. Though the
of the Cybermen from emphasis remained on monsters, an episode
The Second Doctor Who guide approach was taken for this second

the Doctor in first-person prose.

Monster Book. Photos version, covering the first three Tom Baker
from The Tomb of the seasons. As up to date as possible, it provided
Cybermen (1967) were
used in error.
coverage from Robot (1974-75) through to The
Talons of Weng-Chiang, which was aired from
Below left: Tom Baker
visits the US Embassy February to April 1977. Stories were listed in
in London’s transmission order, except for a gaffe in the
Grosvenor Square sequence of three stories from Genesis of the
on 14 February 1978. Daleks to Terror of the Zygons.
Below right: Chris Alongside story synopses, Dicks provided
Achilleos’ cover an insightful character profile of the Fourth
artwork for The Second Doctor, backed up with shorter appraisals
Doctor Who Monster
Book was the subject
of companions Sarah Jane Smith, Harry
of a dispute with Sullivan and newcomer Leela. Priced at 70
publisher Target. pence, the book’s 64 pages were in a much
reduced format, though there were seven
page spreads in colour to compensate.
Obviously designed as a companion to the
first Monster Book, this new item included
a section on the Zygons that was perhaps too
close for comfort, being a near duplicate of
that in the first.
Again, the book proved popular, selling
out by around 1980. Though there was to
be no third Monster Book, The Adventures
of K9 and Other Mechanical Creatures was
essentially a direct follow-up. While trading
on the robot dog’s then-huge popularity, the
book also tacitly acknowledged the marked
absence of monsters in recent seasons.
Certainly it’s hard to imagine a Third
Doctor Who Monster Book packed with
exciting photos of the Shrivenzale and the
Taran wood beast.
Terrance Dicks’ new editor was Brenda
Gardner, who had come to Target from
Penguin in May 1978. Published on
25 September the following year, the
96-page book was released just after Destiny
of the Daleks had aired. Updating readers on
adventures from The Invisible Enemy to The
Armageddon Factor, it took up exactly where
the second Monster Book left off.

MONSTERS MISAPPROPRIATED
P
ublished in October 1977, Achilleos’ second Monster Book art Though Achilleos had already
The Second Doctor Who on its cover, while adverts in US trade taken an indefinite break from
Monster Book spawned papers that summer also repurposed Target, the ensuing dispute meant
a degree of controversy when WH the artwork. Achilleos only found out that the second Monster Book
Allen borrowed Chris Achilleos’ when a friend sent him the front page was his final Doctor Who cover
original cover artwork, ostensibly of Variety. for the publisher.
for promotional purposes. Unknown
to the artist, his illustration was
actually used to promote US sales
of the first three Tom Baker series by
distributor Time Life.
A photocall at London’s American
Embassy on 14 February 1978
gathered together Baker and various
monsters that, by accident or design,
matched exactly those featured on
Achilleos’ second Monster Book
cover, bar the cumbersome K-1 robot
(from Robot, 1974-75). Then, a glossy
Time Life brochure handed out at TV
sales events from March 1978 had

24 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .

Unashamedly a children’s book, its brief,
breezy episode guide is written by the Doctor
in first-person prose rather than as capsule
entries. The book’s second half continues
with a glossary of ‘Other Mechanical Marvels’,
five-line entries on robotic friends and foes
from Cybermen to Chumblies to Voc robots.
The then-rare photos illustrating this section
would be the highlight for most older fans.
A companion volume, Terry Nation’s Dalek
Special, was issued a month later, appearing
on 25 October 1979 and capitalising on
the Daleks’ recent television return.
A shrewd reprinting of a 1974 Nation short
story (originally written for the London
paper Evening News) took up the first half
of the book. Terrance Dicks compiled the
rest, chiefly synopses of all the TV Dalek
stories and thankfully rather longer than
the coverage given in the K9 book. Much of
the page count, however, was given over to
children’s puzzles.
WH Allen’s new art director, Mike
Brett, oversaw these titles. Brett
had tried out Bournemouth-based
commercial artist Andrew Skilleter
on covers for the Star and Target
imprints before handing him his
first Doctor Who engagement with
these two specials, throwing him
in at the deep end with the K9 title.
“I think the idea for the two
books must have been Brenda
Gardner’s,” says Skilleter. “She
would certainly have viewed Doctor
Who as a children’s property.”
He once described the deadlines
on both books as “all too rushed”
– and indeed, he had to call in
his wife Patricia, herself a skilled
illustrator, to lend a hand in
developing the K9
book’s puzzle material.
Skilleter went straight on to
the Dalek Special. “I remember
working hard on the cover for
this,” he says. “I was still doing my
own thing rather than trying to be
MONSTERS REBOOTED
O
n 16 May 1985 WH Allen
issued a reprint of the original
Doctor Who Monster Book,
with a print run of 30,000 copies and
a £1.95 cover price.
Nigel Robinson, the Doctor Who range
editor from autumn 1984, was receptive
to new ideas, particularly those of fellow
fan Gary Russell. “I wouldn’t say it was
wholly down to me,” Gary says. “But yes,
it came up in general conversation and
I said, ‘Why not reprint it?’”
The book was rebuilt from the ground
up, using Russell’s childhood copy as
reference. Aside from introducing the
show’s current ‘neon’ logo, where possible
the layouts were facsimiles of the original,
desperately accurate. Other than striving for
a good likeness of Tom Baker, of course.” As
well as further puzzles, Skilleter provided
half a dozen attractive illustrations for Terry
Nation’s short story. “It’s strange,”he suggests,
“how Target fans don’t appear to pick up
on these in the way they do with the very
early Target line drawings. They were quite
sophisticated in the context of the project.”
Though both 1979 titles sold reasonably
well, Brenda Gardner was made redundant
the very month the K9 special hit the shops.
It was not her last brush with Doctor Who,
with all original errors retained, such
as the mis-spelling of Sontaran Styre
as ‘Steyr’. Photographs were retrieved
from the archives, with similar-looking
substitutes used where necessary. If
there was no close match, layouts
were wholly redesigned.
The blow-ups of Target cover
artwork were almost all of higher
quality than in the original printing,
so they’d obviously been taken
from a fresh source, though almost
certainly not the original artwork.
“It’s possible they had transparencies
of the pictures,” Gary suggests.
“It was standard in those days to
photograph art when it came in.”
however. Forming Piccadilly Press in 1983,
she published two Doctor Who books in
the mid-1980s, written by producer John
Nathan-Turner and illustrated by Skilleter.
She also retained firm ties with Terrance
Dicks, who wrote dozens of children’s fiction
Above left: Andrew
titles for Piccadilly.
Skilleter illustrated the
By the early 1980s, monster books cover of Terry Nation’s
appeared out of favour, with Target’s new Dalek Special in 1979.
editor, Christine Donougher, explaining her Centre: Skilleter
thinking in a 1982 interview with Doctor also provided the
Who Monthly: “It is very hard to cost out at a illustrations for
reasonable price a book with a large number Nation’s short story
The Secret Invasion.
of illustrations, and if we were to do a Monster
Book now, the high cost of production would Above right: The
Doctor Who Monster
make it prohibitively expensive for the buyer.”
Book was reprinted
In 1981 The Doctor Who Programme Guide with a new cover
– Jean-Marc Lofficier’s two-volume reference logo in 1985.
work with no illustrative material – pointed Below left: One of the
the way forward. It was all rather more dry puzzles that appeared
and serious than the junior non-fiction in The Adventures
Terrance Dicks had overseen. “I must say of K9 and Other
Mechanical Creatures.
I was a bit annoyed when they started
getting other people in to cover the same Below right: The K9
book featured
sort of ground in the 1980s,” he concludes.
a cover illustration
The Monster Book era was over, and by Andrew Skilleter.
publishers now aimed their sights
on the dedicated
fan market... DWM
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 25 . .
 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW

STINFO
MANIACS
In the days before Doctor Who Magazine, the devotees of
the Doctor Who Appreciation Society went to extraordinary
lengths to chart the history of their favourite programme.
INTERVIEW BY SIMON GUERRIER
 T
he experience of Doctor Who Dicks’ book The Making of Doctor Who, and in
Left: Former
fandom was very different November that year he learned that the BBC DWAS president Jan
in October 1979, when the was preparing a TV documentary about the Vincent-Rudzki with
first issue of Doctor Who series, Whose Doctor Who, to be shown the actress Katy Manning,
Weekly – now Doctor Who following April. Jan met producer Tony Cash who played Jo Grant.
Magazine – was published. the following month and was told that “He’d Below left: The title
There had already been 14 new episodes of considered us as advisors for the programme screen of the BBC2
documentary Whose
Doctor Who broadcast that year, with another but had decided on Terrance Dicks.” Jan
Doctor Who (1977).
12 to be shown by the end of December. and the team’s expertise was called upon
Bottom left: The
But while fans back then were blessed with nevertheless, which surely counted as official
Doctor (William
numerous new episodes of Doctor Who, they acknowledgment. “I think it was more that Hartnell) with Odysseus
were less well served for old stuff. they didn’t have the information to hand,” (Ivor Salter) and
There was, of course, no iPlayer or catch-up Jan says modestly. “The society was the only Agamemnon (Francis
in those days. Relatively few people had video source around.” De Wolff) in Temple

T
recorders and there were no commercial of Secrets, the first
episode of The Myth
releases of old stories on tape. Repeats were hat first year, the DWAS Reference Makers (1965).
also rare. Over the summer of 1979, BBC1 Department, run by Jeremy Bentham,
Below right: The
screened eight episodes from the previous offered fans longer synopses for each STINFO sheet for Tom
series of Doctor Who, comprising just two of story in Doctor Who’s 1974-75 series, which had Baker’s first series.
the six stories. Episodes from earlier periods introduced the Fourth Doctor. These included
of the series weren’t repeated until the 1980s broadcast dates, cast lists and illustrations the series’ first episode – to the then-current
– again, only occasionally. While some past taken from Radio Times and elsewhere. The Leela. There were also the first STINFOs,
stories had been novelised, the books often photocopied sheets were available for or Story Information Documents, that
varied from what had been broadcast. 12 pence and a self-addressed envelope – and gave detailed synopses of particular stories.
There had been a handful of retrospective they can be seen on the DWAS website at These were sold for six pence per page (some
books, but by this time most of the research http://www.dwasonline.co.uk/node/673. STINFOs were longer than others), to cover
into Doctor Who’s already complex history In 1977, the DWAS produced The Companion the costs of the library photocopier on which
was being conducted by the series’ fans. Volume, a book that gave potted biographies Jeremy produced them.
Organised fandom had existed since the of all the Doctor’s companions beginning By early 1978, STINFOs were, says Jeremy,
mid-1960s, and from 1971 the Doctor with his granddaughter Susan – introduced in “reproduced to order by a local recruitment
Who Fan Club was actively supported and
encouraged by the series’ then producer,
Barry Letts. “I couldn’t afford to buy too
The Doctor Who Appreciation Society was
founded in May 1976. Until then, as its first
president, Jan Vincent-Rudzki, recalls, “If
many tapes so re-used some. But
there were groups of friends who shared
an interest in Doctor Who, they could swap
some stories were ‘kept alive’ by
memories of old episodes.” Older friends
and family members could be quizzed
about vintage stories, so there was a kind of
constant re-listening.” Jan Vincent-Rudzki
oral history of Doctor Who. “But that only
existed in local pockets,” says Jan. “There
wasn’t any organised effort to put people’s
memories together. I suspect the Doctor Who
Fan Club was aiming towards that, but it
never happened.”
Jan changed all this. “I produced a
transmission list of stories, which we sent
out with DWAS memberships in those early
days. I’d visited the offices of the Radio Times
during a school break and compiled a list of
episodes and transmission dates by going
through back issues.” Jan also had a collection
of longer synopses produced in advance of
broadcast by the Royal National Institute
for the Deaf. “At that time, I’d got them from
The War Games [1969] onwards, and later got
copies going back earlier. The ‘problem’ was
that they were based on early scripts and so
didn’t always reflect the transmitted episode.”
Of more value were audio recordings he’d
made of episodes as they were broadcast,
starting from the end of The Myth Makers
(1965). “I couldn’t afford to buy too
many tapes so reused some,” he explains –
meaning he wiped many recordings. “But
some stories were ‘kept alive’ by constant
relistening.” Jan’s colleague at the DWAS,
Stephen Payne, had also written synopses of
episodes soon after broadcast, starting from
The War Games onwards.
The detailed knowledge these sources gave
Jan was put to use when he helped to correct
synopses in the 1976 edition of Terrance

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 27 . .

 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW STINFO MANIACS
Right: The original
STINFO sheets for
1975’s The Ark in
Space and The Android
Invasion, ready for
photocopying.
Below: Jeremy
Bentham in the 1970s.
Bottom left: Angered
at the supposed
cancellation of Doctor
Who in 1985, Ian Levine
smashes his television
for the benefit of the
tabloid press.
Bottom right: Maaga
(Stephanie Bidmead)
and the Doctor (William
Hartnell) in the surviving
six-minute extract from
Four Hundred Dawns,
the first episode of
Galaxy 4 (1965).

consultancy in
Hendon, whose
offices owned one of
the then-new Xerox
dry-copiers, which
generated good
definition reproductions for about five pence
per sheet. The library photocopier, while
a couple of pence cheaper per page, was an
older machine with poor definition – which
you can see in some of the earlier synopses,
where I’d typed them with a balder ribbon!”
So what was he basing his story
information on? “By 1978, my sources
were principally four-fold, if you include
asking my peers in DWAS, such as Jan or
Gordon Blows, the editor of the fanzine
TARDIS, whenever I hit blank spots. Then
there was my own collection of Radio Times
back-issue clippings, which went back to
the beginning, supplemented by a stack
of the programme synopses produced by
the RNID. And the radio producer and DJ
Ian Levine was an active contributor to the
DWAS in those days.”
Aged ten when Doctor Who began, Levine
had quickly been hooked. During the second
ever story, The Mutants (aka The Daleks,
1963-64) he started recording the soundtracks
of episodes on a reel-to-reel recorder. This

THE WATCHERS
I
an Levine bought his first video
machine in the summer of 1976 and
recorded all of Doctor Who from
that point. But when he contacted the
Doctor Who production office that
same year about acquiring
older stories, he was put
in touch with the DWAS
– who had nothing to
offer him. Indeed, many
of the DWAS executive
had never seen a video
machine before.
Even so, Jan Vincent-
Rudzki says that his “number
one aim” at the time was to get
to see old episodes. Soon after Ian made
contact, the DWAS executive borrowed
from the British Film Institute a 12-minute
clip from The Daleks, the second episode
of The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964). This
was the first time they’d seen anything of
the First Doctor since the original episodes
were broadcast.
Then they made contact with James
Russell – son of film director Ken Russell –
who had bought a video machine
a few months ahead of Ian
and had a slightly larger
collection of recent
Doctor Who, including
repeats of two stories
from the previous year.
James also found a
way to copy the Dalek
Invasion of Earth clip onto
tape so it could be kept in
the DWAS collection. By 1977
Ian was hunting down further old episodes
– and, in doing so, helped save many of
them from being junked by the BBC. copy – further early material, including the (1965) lasting nearly six minutes. The
Meanwhile, Jan’s involvement in the TV whole of The Zarbi, the second episode episode was subsequently wiped by the
documentary Whose Doctor Who meant of The Web Planet (1965). Jan was even BBC, but Jan’s footage survived and today
that the team was able to see – and presented with a gift: a clip from Galaxy 4 can be enjoyed by us all on DVD.

28 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
could only capture up to 15 minutes, so
Levine hastily wrote notes on the remaining
ten minutes of each episode. From these two
sources, he’d write up a detailed account
of the episode in an exercise book before
wiping the tape and using it to record the
next instalment. By The Chase (1965), he
had a better recorder that could capture all
of an episode, so his exercise books provide
a word-for-word record of all dialogue. He
still had to reuse the tape each week, but he
continued recording Doctor Who with this
degree of detail until The Tomb of the Cybermen
(1967), when he started falling behind.
“At some point in 1977,” says Jeremy,
“Ian tasked his then secretary with the
Herculean job of photocopying these exercise
books, capturing two pages per sheet of
foolscap paper – which was still around in
those days – and giving these copies to me.”
A
s well as these detailed written
accounts, Jeremy also had access
to audio recordings made by
Richard Landen, another member of the
society. “Like Ian,” explains Jeremy, “Richard
recorded the soundtracks of episodes,
starting early in the third series [1965].
“By the end of 1978, DWAS
members were ordering between
800 and 1,000 copies of each
STINFO per annum.” Jeremy Bentham
REEL LIFE
R
ichard
Landen’s
archive of
audio tapes came in
useful when he was
asked to take over from
Jeremy Bentham as the
main feature writer of
Doctor Who Monthly,
Doctor Who Weekly’s
successor, in 1983.
“In the 1960s I would
record each episode and,
because I loved Doctor
Who so much, I would listen to it
three or four times before the next
week’s episode,” Richard told DWM in
Unlike Ian, he recorded them on large
reel-to-reel tapes, which he kept. He was
then good enough to offer copies to folks
like me.” Where soundtracks existed, Jeremy
would start by listening to those over a series
of nights, making notes, which he’d then
cross-reference with his other sources before
writing up his synopses.
2004. “I had been
doing this for many
years and I felt I knew many of the on screen. I didn’t know a lot of
episodes back to front. So I didn’t feel the behind-the-scenes information
as though I needed to do too much – director’s names and so on – but
research into what actually happened Jeremy would help me with all that.”
“By the end of 1978, DWAS members were
ordering between 800 and 1,000 copies of
each STINFO per annum,” he says. “Older
stories often proved more popular among
UK members, while the rapidly expanding
American fanbase hoovered up everything
with Tom Baker’s Doctor.”
The following year Jeremy left the reference
department of the DWAS and joined Doctor
Who Weekly, where he continued to research
the history of the series, now for a much
larger audience. “I’m certain what we did at
the DWAS pales into insignificance compared
to what’s since been discovered,” he says.
“In the late 1970s we never even knew of the
existence of such facilities as the BBC’s Drama
Script Library or its Written Archives Centre.
But we were growing little acorns...” DWM
Top left: Issues 79
and 80 of Doctor Who
Monthly, published
in 1983.
Top right: Richard
Landen took over from
Jeremy Bentham as the
lead writer for Doctor
Who Monthly in the
early 1980s.
Left: Bentham’s
original STINFO sheets
for Genesis of the
Daleks (1975).
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 29 . .
 THE

DWM
THE
INTERVIEW

FOUNDATION
TRILOGY

In the 1970s, television series

were generally seen as
disposable products, unworthy
of in-depth cataloguing. In the
early 1980s, a pair of Doctor Who
books by Jean-Marc Lofficier
led to a new approach...
INTERVIEW BY ANDREW PIXLEY

30 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
 ooking at the ever-expanding

L
Doctor Who: The Complete
History partwork as it creeps
across my bookshelf,
I know that despite its scale
and scope it can never achieve
the same impact or influence as
two hardback books that I purchased for £9
at a Sheffield bookshop in May 1981.
The Doctor Who Programme Guide became
the bible for a generation of devotees,
offering a fundamental listing of stories,
transmission dates, cast, synopses and
key crew plus a handy A to Z of all things
‘Whoniversal’. Now, it looks quaint. Back
then, it triggered a whole new approach to
books about television history.
Radio had already pointed the way with
The Inside Story of Dick Barton by Geoffrey
Webb and Neil Tuson, published by
Convoy in April 1950. This offered a very
early example of a story guide – a breezy
single-paragraph overview of the hero’s
first year on the BBC’s Light Programme.
The approach was similar, in fact, to the
summing up of the Doctor’s travels by his

“I’m way overqualified to write

counsel for the defence in Piccolo’s 1972
publication The Making of Doctor Who.
When television became serious and
respectable at the end of the 1950s, The
Armchair Theatre: How to Write, Design, Direct,
Act, Enjoy Television Plays (Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1959) included a listing of the first
three years of ABC’s acclaimed anthology
with date, genre, writer, director, designer
and stars; the listing was subsequently
updated in John Russell Taylor’s Anatomy
of a Television Play, which Weidenfeld &
Nicolson issued in September 1962. Eight
years later, John Elliot’s Mogul: The Making of
a Myth (Barrie & Jenkins, 1970) took a similar
approach – sans cast lists – for the popular
1965 BBC oil drama.
comics and stuff like that. Hopefully
the world of international banking
has recovered from its loss!”
Across the Atlantic, The Making of Star
Trek by Stephen Edward Poe, alias ‘Stephen
E Whitfield’, and Gene Roddenberry
(Ballantine, 1968) was the first book of its
kind on the US phenomenon, concluding
with a list of ‘Star Trek Shows’ for the first two
series – a minimalist, wartime-interrogation
format of title, airdate and guest stars
only. In March 1969 Bjo Trimble’s
Star Trek Concordance appeared as
a fan venture from Mathom House,
later forming a lavish large-format
paperback (Ballantine, 1976) that
offered cast and crew credits alongside
synopses and a comprehensive lexicon.
A Star Trek Catalog edited by Gerry Turnbull
(Grosset & Dunlap, October 1979) was
rudimentary by comparison.
The Doctor Who Programme Guide set new
standards when its two hardback volumes hit
the bookshops in May 1981, weeks after the
Fourth Doctor’s demise in Logopolis. Its author,
the then-26-year-old Jean-Marc Lofficier,
was to carve a successful career in the comics
field, working for DC and Marvel on many
major titles. Was this really the best use of
his qualifications, one might wonder? “Law
degree from the Sorbonne and MBA from the
Paris Business School!” laughs Jean-
Marc. “I’m way overqualified to write
comics and stuff like that. Hopefully, Opposite page:
Bill Donohoe’s cover
the world of international banking has
artwork for The Doctor
recovered from its loss!” Who Programme Guide.

A
Above left: The
longside his original banking Armchair Theatre: How
career, Jean-Marc had always to Write, Design, Direct,
enjoyed science-fiction. “I was Act, Enjoy Television
already writing short stories, reviews Plays was published
and articles for French fanzines when in December 1959.
I was 16. Then I started contributing Above right: The
Making of Star Trek was
to the fanzine L’Écran Fantastique,
published by Ballantine
which became a prozine. In the in September 1968.
mid-1970s, this was what got me
Far left: The paperback
writing about TV series, a niche no-one edition of the first
else was covering at the time. I began volume of The Doctor
with The Prisoner, then Star Trek, Rod Who Programme
Serling’s The Twilight Zone and Night Guide (1981).
Gallery, and finally Doctor Who – which Left: The 1976 edition
no-one, absolutely no-one, had heard of Bjo Trimble’s Star
of in France at the time, except for the Trek Concordance,
a highly detailed
two Peter Cushing movies. work that had first
“I, at least, had seen some Jon appeared in 1969.
Pertwee and Tom Baker stories

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 31 . .

 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW Jean-Marc Lofficier

Jean-Marc’s original dossier on the Doctor

during my many visits to the UK. I first
caught an episode of The Green Death [1973],
then miscellaneous instalments – never
a complete story – up to The Deadly Assassin
[1976]. I remember being very puzzled when
Pertwee regenerated into Baker. When
I moved to the US in 1978 they were running
the Baker seasons from Robot [1974-75] to
The Invasion of Time [1978], so I was able to
catch up with what I’d missed. I always loved
Doctor Who.”
It was from his time
in L’Écran Fantastique might help achieve this.
Actually, it kind of did. Thanks to one of my
friends, Alain Carrazé, some early Tom Baker
episodes ended up being bought, dubbed
and aired on Alain’s show Temps X for TF1.
If I helped bring Doctor Who to France, that
alone might get me into Heaven!”
Jean-Marc continued his work beyond the
two-part feature. “The A-to-Z encyclopedia of
the ‘Whoniverse’ – a term coined by my wife
and co-writer, Randy – was produced out of a
sense of stubborn perversity in addition to the
L’Écran Fantastique material. If I had to credit
anyone for that concept, it’s Bjo Trimble,
whose Star Trek Concordance a couple of years
concluded with The Invasion of Time, and he’d
since updated this to The Horns of Nimon
(1979-80). “There was a fair amount of
rewriting, editing and so on, plus the frantic
last-minute addition of Tom Baker’s final
year,” recalls the author. “Ninety per cent of
it was assembled with the help of Jane Judge.
The BBC copied all the files they had – mainly
internal synopses and cast lists – and gave
them to me. Then, after Graham had gone,
[producer] John Nathan-Turner came in and
provided the missing information, especially
for 1980/81. I carried a box of scripts back to
Los Angeles, which I read and indexed on the
plane, typed it all up right away, and sent by
express mail to Christine.”

I
on L’Écran Fantastique earlier inspired me to try my hand at the n the digital age, where a fan with finances
Top left: The Third that Jean-Marc’s same thing with Doctor Who. I did it all by can own every broadcast episode on DVD
Doctor (Jon Pertwee)
Whoniversal work cutting and pasting strips of paper before or CD, the notion of a book about 18 years
examines a suspicious
mushroom in The Green would spring. re-photocopying then in the days before of a TV show assembled from mere paper and
Death (1973). “I wrote a dossier word processors! When completed, a few videos is like remembering how NASA
Above left: The Doctor on Doctor Who while I bound the whole thing into three-ring put men on the Moon with less computing
regenerates into his I was working for binders and sent one copy to Graham power than a smartphone – a miracle. It was
fourth incarnation Crédit Lyonnais and one copy to Terrance. At least, that touch and go. “John changed some names
(Tom Baker) in Part – a great, unsung way, they would see that they hadn’t and made some requests at the last minute.
Six of Planet of the
patron of my early wasted their time helping me. Poor Christine had to scramble to make
Spiders (1974).
endeavours – in Los “Much to my surprise, I was some corrections in the paperback version,
Top centre: The
Angeles. I wrote to contacted soon after by like removing the actor playing the Watcher
1989 edition of the
Programme Guide [former script editor] Christine Donougher, an in Logopolis. This edition was published in
featured a new cover Terrance Dicks to editor at WH Allen. October 1981.” Indeed, the hardback edition
illustration by Alister request an interview Unbeknownst to originally included an errata slip, explaining
Pearson and an and he responded me, Terrance had such changes as the ‘Tharks’ in the Warriors’
amended title. enthusiastically. loaned her his copy Gate synopsis becoming Tharils.
Top right: In 2015, I also wrote to the of my binder and The two books ultimately became a trilogy.
Paul Smith’s unofficial BBC production office suggested that it In December 1989, Target issued a revised
take on the format
covered every story
where [producer] might make Volume 1 as Doctor Who: The Programme
from the 1996 TV Movie Graham Williams and a worthwhile book. Guide, updating the story with a provisional
to The Time of the [production secretary] Christine agreed. listing for that year’s series. It was followed
Doctor (2013). Jane Judge alsoresponded I think I coined the by two other Target volumes: The Terrestrial
Right: The Tharils very positively, mostly name ‘Programme Index (1991), which chronicled other media
from Warriors’ Gate because they were trying Guide’… but I’m beyond television, and a retooled version of
(1981) were referred to sell Doctor Who to not 100 per cent the Volume 2 lexicon christened The Universal
to as Tharks in an early
version of the script.
French TV and thought sure. Maybe Databank (1992). “These were the result
my long, two-part article Christine did.” of [editor] Peter Darvill-Evans and I going

32 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
‘fanwonky’ to the extreme,” observes Jean-
Marc. “Correcting, updating, indexing every
bit left to index. Why not? Had there been a
sane person in the room when we discussed
doing these, they would’ve slapped us silly
and we would have come to our senses. Alas,
there was not!”
Another update – Doctor Who Programme
Guide – was published by Virgin (Target’s new
owners) in June 1994, and a fourth edition
as The Doctor Who Programme Guide appeared
via iUniverse in May 2003. “The motivation
was mostly to keep the old edition in print
somehow and ‘closing the books’ with the TV
movie,” explains Jean-Marc. “As it is I don’t
think that edition makes any money at all.”
THE Nth DOCTOR
I
n January 1997, when the
dust of the TV Movie had
settled, Virgin published
Doctor Who: The Nth Doctor,
in which Jean-Marc delineated
aborted film scripts and nixed
telemovie drafts. “I was in a
unique position, having been
involved with both the Leonard
Nimoy and the Philip Segal
versions,” he explains. “I had all
those scripts at hand. It seemed
a waste to not record this in
one form or another. Johnny
Byrne had written a number
of drafts of his Doctor Who
see his contribution preserved
somewhere, so he sent me a
box of all his scripts. The sad
thing with movie projects is, you
only see the part of the iceberg
that’s above water – what got
made. You never get to see the
90 per cent that’s underwater,
that never got made. Retelling
the scripts alone would have
made for a very slim book, so we
added interviews and massive
bits of ‘wonkishness’ where
I tried to reconcile every bit of
continuity. That made the book
thick enough to be worth doing,

T
he Doctor Who Programme Guide not
only laid the groundwork for further
work on the series, including notable
volumes such as Doctor Who: The Television
Companion by David J Howe and Stephen
James Walker (BBC, 1998). It also opened
the floodgates to two decades of similar
work on other series, starting with Tony
Attwood’s Blake’s 7: The Programme Guide
(WH Allen, 1982), Marc Scott Zicree’s The
Twilight Zone Companion (Bantam, 1982)
and Dave Rogers’ The Avengers (Michael
Joseph, 1983). Then, following Virgin’s
reprints of the Doctor Who and Blake’s 7
books, came The Red Dwarf Programme Guide
by Chris Howarth and Steve Lyons (1993),
Thunderbirds-Stingray-Captain Scarlet: The
Authorised Programme Guide by John Peel
(1993), The Avengers Programme Guide by
Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping
(1994), The New Trek Programme Guide by
Cornell/Day/Topping (1995), The Babylon
movie and he was very keen to economically speaking.”
File by Andy Lane (1997), Shut It!: A Fan’s
Guide to 70s Cops on the Box by Day and
Topping (1999), Cunning: The Blackadder
Programme Guide by Howarth and Lyons
(May 2000), and many more.
A good idea will run and run, and in April
2015 Paul Smith’s The New Who Programme
Guide (Wonderful Books) adopted the classic
format in chronicling the Doctor’s exploits
up to The Time of the Doctor (2013) – with
Jean-Marc’s blessing. Had he been tempted
to do the job himself ? “Not in a million
years! Been there, done that. I think Paul
did a terrific job. I was very, very pleased
with his book.”
Nowadays, Doctor Who is only a part of
Jean-Marc’s universe. “I’m running three
small presses. Black Coat Press in the US/UK
publishes French sci-fi and mystery books
in English. Rivière Blanche in France does
the same but in French. And I now control
Hexagon Comics, the successor of a French
comics publisher that began in the 1950s,
which I used to read as a kid. As such, I’m
kind of my own Stan Lee or Roy Thomas.
I write most of the new stories and supervise
the reprinting of old series. It’s a lot of fun
and I’m totally free to do whatever I want.
“There’s also Doctor Omega, a 1906 French Above: The 2003
sci-fi novel which features a hero who reprint edition of
shares some remarkable similarities with the The Nth Doctor by
William Hartnell Doctor. We’ve done some Jean-Marc Lofficier
and his wife Randy.
new stories with the character, which is a way
of remaining somewhat involved with Doctor Below left:
A special hardback of
Who by proxy.” Doctor Omega from
Almost 40 years after he aimed to share Jean-Marc’s Black
the Whoniverse, does the show’s first Coat Press. The book
guidebook compiler still keep a date with the features an illustration
Time Lord? “Are you joking?” he says. “We from the original 1906

“I think I coined the name watch every episode live as soon as it comes
on. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. At this
edition on the cover.
Below: Jean-Marc

‘Programme Guide’... but

and Randy Lofficier,
moment, I’m eagerly waiting for this season’s
at home in France.
ending with The Doctor Falls!” DWM

I’m not 100 per cent sure.”

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 33 . .

 K I N G
A
M ISTO RY
H
f fe e -table
c o
h o ’ s first ration,
rW eb
Docto 83’s A Cel o m enon
1 9 e n
book, b l i s h ing ph a u thor
p u e d
was a n t a l l y turn
ccide o the
that a g i n t .
e t e r Hainin l historian’
P a
w ’ s ‘offici
sh o KL E Y
AU L K IR
U RE BY P
FE AT

W
hen Peter Haining died of
a heart attack in 2007,
aged 67, his Guardian
obituary spoke
admiringly of how ‘deep
knowledge, lightly borne,
had powered a pen for hire’.
It’s a fitting description of a man who,
in the course of a 50-year career, wrote and
edited more than 200 books on everything
from HG Wells, Sherlock Holmes and Count
Dracula to scarecrows, cricket, the Channel
Tunnel and Nazi gold. And, in a fertile flurry
of activity in the 1980s – during which he
turned out five large-format hardbacks in the
space of six years – he also became arguably
the world’s most successful chronicler of
Doctor Who.
Born in Enfield in 1940, Haining developed
an early fascination with gruesome stories
of terror and witchcraft, fuelled by imported
pulp magazines like Weird Tales. While still
at school, he began writing articles for
“anything that would publish me”, including
local newspapers, parish pump newsletters
and even a magazine about racing pigeons.
At 17 he landed a job as a reporter on
the West Essex Gazette, then moved to Fleet
Street as features editor of National Newsagent
magazine before joining the publishing house
New English Library, where he got to indulge
his childhood passions by editing bestselling
anthologies of Gothic horror, science-fiction,
supernatural and detective stories.
Leaving to pursue a freelance career, he
put his magpie mind and extensive clippings
library to good use, writing prolifically on
any subject he could turn his hand to, as well
as penning several novels. He was successful
enough to be able to acquire a fine country
house in Suffolk, which he filled with books.
There he was able to work while caring for
his autistic son Sean, one of three children
with his wife Philippa Waring, also a writer.
I
n 1982 Haining was invited for lunch
by Bob Tanner, managing director of
publisher WH Allen, who asked if he’d
be interested in writing a book celebrating
20 years of Doctor Who. Interviewed three
years later by Mark Campbell for his fanzine
Skonnos, Haining admitted he “wasn’t
overstruck with the idea”. Though he
remembered William Hartnell and Patrick
Troughton as the Doctor, and his kids still
watched the show, he was by no
means an expert, or even much
of a fan. But a writer who could
deliver something that would
appeal to casual viewers, as well as
the hardcore faithful, was exactly
what Tanner was looking for.
Producing what would be
the first lavish, large-format
coffee-table book about Doctor
Who was, according to Haining,
“a big gamble” for WH Allen,
especially at £10.95 a pop. After
lunching with the show’s then
producer, John Nathan-Turner,
the author turned for help to
former script editor and tireless
Who novelist Terrance Dicks, who
in turn put him in touch with
Jeremy Bentham, co-founder of
the Doctor Who Appreciation Society and the coming out of a cockpit doorway, and that
Opposite page: The
main writer on Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly in was just transposed to balloons coming out 20th anniversary of
its infancy. of the TARDIS.” Doctor Who was marked
“He asked if he could come round, look at Published on 18 September 1983, Doctor by The Five Doctors
my collection and see what reference material Who: A Celebration – Two Decades Through Time (1983) and (centre)
I had,” recalls Jeremy. “He said, ‘There’s and Space lived up to its promise to give Doctor celebrations at Longleat.
some brilliant stuff here, but you’re probably Who pride of place on the nation’s coffee Above left: Peter
the best person to write it, not me.’ So he tables. Across 256 generously illustrated Haining, as he
appeared on the
commissioned me to write the ‘Whoniverse’ pages, illuminated by Haining’s occasionally dustjacket of his 1983
section of A Celebration.” over-ripe prose (John F Kennedy, we are told, book Doctor Who:
This guide to “the Doctor’s adventures was the “victim of a gunman’s bullets which A Celebration.
and their backgrounds” included a synopsis had exploded the life from his body”), it was Above right: Two of
of each serial, plus a sprinkling of what a fitting testament to the show’s first 20 years. Haining’s horror-themed
Jeremy calls “behind-the-scenes gossip, facts And what’s more, it was a phenomenal hit, books. The Midnight
People was published
“Peter knew he wanted to tell the by Ensign in 1968, and
Witchcraft and Black
Magic was published
story of 20 years of Doctor Who, by Grossett & Dunlop
in 1972.
and he was supremely good at
Below: Haining was
initially reluctant to
write about Doctor
pulling it all together.” Jeremy Bentham
Who, but his first book
on the subject was
a huge success.
and trivia”. Meanwhile, Haining set about
interviewing and sourcing contributions
from the main players in the series’ history,
from both sides of the camera. “One of the
first problems I could foresee,” he told Mark
Campbell, “because the programme had run
for so long, is that I might be running into a
lot of ego situations. But in fact the response
from everybody was absolutely marvellous.”
The “greatest boost”, said Haining, was
the enthusiasm shown by Doctor Who’s first
producer, Verity Lambert, who had just taken
over as head of EMI Films, but willingly gave
up an afternoon to share her recollections
of the show. “That was a marvellous kick-in
to the whole thing, and everything else fell
into place.”
“Peter knew he wanted to tell the story
of 20 years of Doctor Who, looking at the key
landmarks and the key people, and he was
supremely good at pulling it all together,”
says Jeremy. “He came into it the same as any
former Fleet Street journalist would: ‘What’s
the story I want to tell here?’
“The title had more or less been
determined when he got in touch with me
in 1982,” he adds. “I think they even had
a vague idea of what the cover was going to
look like – it was based on a TV advert for
an airline where you saw some balloons
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 35 . .
 Peter Haining

outperforming all expectations and going
Above left: Pages from
the Celebration chapter
on to sell more than 100,000 copies.
‘The TARDIS – and the Jeremy Bentham believes the book was
Reality of Time Travel’. perfectly timed to ride the surge of interest in
Doctor Who generated by the 20th anniversary
saw of Patrick Troughton’s Doctor leafing
through his 500-year diary.
In addition to the material supplied by
Jeremy – who describes himself, wryly, as
Haining’s “scientific adviser, but without
cleared and paid,” says Jeremy. “That meant
you couldn’t clear a photograph if one actor
held it up, so this was a way of illustrating a
book without risking the ire of the BBC.”

F
Above right: Colin
Baker and John Nathan- story The Five Doctors, the famously over- the yellow roadster” – the writer spent time inding he had another hit on his hands,
Turner at a US Doctor subscribed weekend celebration at Longleat sourcing clippings from the British Library’s Haining promised to do “one more
Who convention. House and, equally significantly, the show’s Newspaper Archive at Colindale, piecing book” for WH Allen – “though I said
Below left: A Doctor burgeoning profile in the United States. together the story of Doctor Who as largely that after the first, and the second, and was
Who Magazine advert Naturally, with success came the demand told through articles in the popular press. made to look like an idiot,” he admitted.
for Haining’s 1984 book
The Key to Time.
for a follow-up. “When it was finished The book was illustrated using artwork This was The Doctor Who File (1986), built
I thought, ‘That’s it, I don’t want to do any sent in by fans. “WH Allen was bombarded around a series of essays, profiles, interviews
Below centre: The Key
to Time dustjacket
more,’” Haining told Skºnnos. “But, rather like with stuff from people looking for the and contributions from such Who luminaries
was illustrated by the series itself, it hasn’t worked out that way. opportunity to do a Target cover,” as Terry Nation, Douglas Adams, Robert
Andrew Skilleter. WH Allen were so pleased with it, they asked explains Jeremy. “It was [co-designer] Holmes and Colin Baker. Inevitably, “one
Below right: The Key me to do another one. I said, ‘I’m not going Mike Brett’s idea to do something with more book” turned into two (The Time-
to Time was inspired to rewrite the same book again, that would all this stuff, because some of it was good, Travellers’ Guide, 1987) and then three (1988’s
by the 500 Year Diary, be a real rip-off.’” and some of it… well, if nothing else, it 25 Glorious Years), by which time fans were
seen here with the Two things eventually informed what reflected enthusiasm.” beginning to suspect the well might be
Second Doctor (Patrick
Troughton) in a publicity
would become 1984’s The Key to Time – a It was also a useful way of reducing running dry. They weren’t the only ones.
shot from The Power of year-by-year record of 21 years of Doctor overheads. “This was the period when JN-T “It started to get more difficult once source
the Daleks (1966). Who. One was Jeremy Bentham’s ready-made [John Nathan-Turner] pushed through an material began drying up,” admits Jeremy
cuttings file, and another edict that anyone who was in a BBC Bentham, who contributed to all five
was a picture Haining Doctor Who photograph had to be books. “It probably did get to
a point where Peter was saying,
‘Look, I’m happy to take the
money, but please give me
a project that’s got a bit
more to get my teeth into
than retreading the same
old ground.’ Because, if
nothing else, it would
start to damage his own
reputation. But

36 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .

“It took Doctor Who publishing into
the mainstream and away from the
slightly culty thing a lot of people
still regarded it as.” Jeremy Bentham
if we thought we could get together five or six
good ideas for a book, then it would be okay.”
Did Peter’s relationship with Doctor Who
become a bit like John Nathan-Turner’s –
constantly on his way out of the door, before
being ‘persuaded to stay’? “Up to a point,”
says Jeremy. “But he did get to a stage where
he said ‘enough is enough’ and went off to
new projects.”
Today, with a forest of literature devoted
to every obscure corner of the Doctor Who
phenomenon, it’s difficult to grasp just what
a landmark publication A Celebration was.
“It was remarkable as a personal achievement,”
says Jeremy, “but also in the way it took
Doctor Who publishing into the mainstream
and away from that slightly culty thing a lot
of people still regarded it as.”
Peter Haining, meanwhile – a man who, by
his own admission, “always moved from one
thing to the next” – found himself berthed
in the world of Doctor Who long enough to
become not only something of an authority
(it was Haining who was approached for
comment when the Press Association covered
Doctor Who’s supposed ‘cancellation’ in 1985)
but a bit of a fan, too.
In 1999 Haining briefly
returned to the subject with
Headline’s The Nine Lives of
Doctor Who, featuring potted
biographies of all the actors
to have played the TV Time
Lord, plus Peter Cushing. The
cover reproduced a quote from
the Evening Standard calling
TRUTH OR
CONSEQUENCES
Library, he eschewed rival
publisher Pan’s lurid shock tactics,
instead taking pride in unearthing
neglected and forgotten
authors, and disinterring rare
early works by the likes of Ray
Bradbury. Jeremy Bentham, for
his part, has nothing but praise
for his friend and collaborator.
“He was such an amazingly
experienced writer, and an
incredibly generous person, who
was always happy to share his
knowledge, and his experience.
He told me all the things I didn’t
know I didn’t know.”
O
ccasionally, critics
have questioned the
reliability of some of
Peter Haining’s works, including
1977’s The Legend and Bizarre
Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack
and his controversial 1993 book
arguing, not very persuasively,
that Sweeney Todd was a real
historical figure. Dirk Bogarde
damned him with faint praise
by describing his biography of
Greta Garbo as “a perfectly
respectable scissors and paste
job”, while Haining himself
made no secret of the fact
his ‘True Mysteries’ series,
published by Armada in the
1970s, were “elaborated”
stories that contained “an
element of the truth”.
Yet he was anything but
a hack. At New English
him ‘the official historian of Doctor Who’.
Many would argue there are more credible
contenders for that title – not least Doctor
Who Magazine’s Andrew Pixley and Jeremy
Bentham himself. But it’s certainly true that
no-one else has brought the story of our
favourite television show to the masses with
quite as much success, and with such a deft
lightness of touch, as Peter Haining.
When it comes to Doctor Who, perhaps he
was more than just a pen for hire after all. DWM
Above left: Examples
of the fan art
reproduced in The
Key to Time, by Tim
Pieraccini (left) and DG
Careless (right).
Above right:
Haining’s first book
on Sweeney Todd
came out in 1979.
His science-fiction
anthology The Future
Makers was published
in 1969.
Left: Haining followed
The Key to Time with
The Doctor Who File
(1986), The Time-
Traveller’s Guide
(1987) and 25 Glorious
Years (1988).
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 37 . .
 TEXTING
THE DOCTOR
The most serious, and arguably the most challenging,
books about Doctor Who are the numerous cultural
studies texts that have appeared since the early 1980s.
FEATURE BY MATTHEW KILBURN
M
edia studies emerged as a field
in British further and higher
education during the 1960s
and 70s. It sought to apply
theories developed in the
study of literature to mass
communication, whether
newspapers, magazines and popular fiction,
or film and television.
An allied but distinct field was cultural
studies, which explored all forms of culture,
not just that of the elite or establishment.
Cultural studies borrowed the idea of the text
from literary studies, but extended it to cover
moving and still images, fashion, and much
more from everyday life. It sought to examine varies according to the redundancy
the ways that different people experienced the of auxiliary performance codes?”
same texts and how these could result in That last line borrows directly from
a variety of reactions and meanings. a sentence on page 249 of Tulloch and
The first book in this vein devoted to our Alvarado’s book. The sentence itself is a
favourite television series was Doctor Who: The summary of something argued by another
Unfolding Text by John Tulloch and Manuel writer in another book – Keir Elam in the
Alvarado, both of them experienced scholars 1980 publication The Semiotics of Theatre and
of culture and media. Published in November Drama. However, for many Doctor Who fans in
1983 to coincide with the programme’s 20th 1987 the line typified the mysterious language
anniversary, it drew heavily on interviews with with which academics were beginning to
production personnel and cast members, past explore Doctor Who.
and present. And the book would soon be Some of the interview material in Tulloch
accorded a satirical reference in Doctor Who and Alvarado’s book, conducted in 1981 in the 1990s had cult followings like the
itself. In Part Two of Dragonfire, transmitted and 1982, was drawn upon in Tulloch’s later fantasy and crime series studied by Jenkins.
on 30 November 1987, a guard is given work Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor An academic language of cult TV emerged
the following short speech: “Oh, you’ve no Who and Star Trek, which was co-written which recognised that some older series
idea what a relief it is for me to have such a with Henry Jenkins. However, by the time had displayed a self-conscious design
stimulating philosophical discussion. There this book appeared in 1995 no new Doctor aesthetic or developed a mythology in
are so few intellectuals about these days. Tell Who had appeared on television since 1989. the way that Twin Peaks, The X-Files and
me, what do you think of the assertion that The text, as far as television was concerned, Babylon 5 had in the 1990s.
the semiotic thickness of a performed text seemed to have stopped unfolding. In 2003 University of Texas Press published
Reading Between Designs by Piers D Britton

A new generation of media and Simon J Barker. This used The Avengers,
The Prisoner and Doctor Who as case studies

analysts were influenced by

in television design, an under-explored area
at the time. All three series were depicted as
using a level of stylised design in the 1960s,

Jenkins in the way they looked 70s and 80s which, they argued, British
television wouldn’t utilise on primetime

at the engagement between series until 2000. Doctor Who was singled out
for the length of its run and consequently

television series and their fans.

the evolution of its designs as pressures on
production shifted.
James Chapman, now professor of film at
the University of Leicester, began discussing a Opposite page: The
Several currents in academic writing about history of Doctor Who with publisher IB Tauris melancholy Tenth
television led to a reassessment of Doctor in 2001. This followed his earlier books on the Doctor (David Tennant)
Who. Henry Jenkins’ study of fan cultures James Bond films and on British adventure visits Verity Newman
in The End of Time Part
and fan creativity, Textual Poachers (1992), series of the 1960s, and it was suggested by Two (2010).
had argued that fan engagement with texts his copy editor, Steve Tribe, who has written
Above left: Arnheim
created a new form of folk culture which and edited various Doctor Who titles for BBC (Chris MacDonnell)
was often at odds with the demands of Books. Chapman was researching his book at quotes from The
producers rather than being guided by them. the BBC Written Archives Centre in the week Unfolding Text as he
Jenkins looked at several fandoms active in Doctor Who’s return was announced in 2003. discusses philosophy
the USA in the late 1980s – Doctor Who was The result, Inside the TARDIS (2006), was with the Doctor
(Sylvester McCoy)
only one of many, with more space being based as much as possible on documentary
in Part Two of
given to Beauty and the Beast, Star Trek, The evidence and an awareness of historical Dragonfire (1987).
Professionals and Blake’s 7 fans. pressures on the series. Among Chapman’s Above right: The first
A new generation of media analysts were arguments was his defence of the quality of edition of Tulloch and
influenced by Jenkins in the way they looked Doctor Who’s visual effects in the 1960s and Alvarado’s Doctor
at the engagement between television series 70s; he also emphasised the influence of Who: The Unfolding
and their fans. This coincided with a growing BBC-wide constraints on production teams, Text (1983).
interest in ‘quality television’, which was held particularly when they came in for criticism Left: Tulloch and
to challenge the conservatism of American from fans after 1977. Jenkins’ Science
Fiction Audiences:
television through ambitious non-linear or Meanwhile, David Butler, then lecturer
Watching Doctor Who
season-length plotting, large ensemble casts in screen studies at the University of and Star Trek was
and ambitious design and cinematography. Manchester, was preparing the first academic published in 1995.
Several of the ‘quality’ series which emerged conference on Doctor Who. ‘Time and

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 39 . .

 TEXTING THE DOCTOR
Relative Dissertations in Space’ was held
Right: Author in Manchester on 1 July 2004. A collection
Matt Hills. of essays with the same title followed in
Far right: Hills’ 2007. Butler compared the return of Doctor
Triumph of a Time Lord Who to the recovery of the series from an
was published by IB
Tauris in January 2010.
‘inferiority complex’ which deemed it less
worthy of study than others; in turn, this
Below left: IB Tauris
published James echoed how television studies had fought to
Chapman’s Inside justify the scrutiny of a medium widely seen
the TARDIS in as disposable. The 19 contributors included
September 2013. several writers with professional Doctor Who
Below right: credits, including Daniel O’Mahony and Paul
The US edition of Magrs, as well as academics with plenty of
The Unfolding Text, fan knowledge. Their approaches to Doctor
and Matt Hill’s Doctor
Who: The Unfolding
Who included analysis of the series’ ideology,
Event (2015). the use of mediating figures in storytelling
such as the ‘Evil Human’ in Dalek tales, and on Fan Cultures [2002] by thinking about
debates of authorship, using the links between fandom and academia, as
the cases of writer Robert well as the very direct and newfound role
Holmes and producer John of fandom in Doctor Who’s production. And
Nathan-Turner. it built on The Pleasures of Horror [2005] by
Both Inside the TARDIS and using work in horror studies to theorise cult niche and back”. Booy’s PhD from the
Time and Relative Dissertations post-2005 Doctor Who monsters.” University of East Anglia had concerned
in Space were published after The book was completed during the questions of authority in the representation
Doctor Who had returned transition between showrunners Russell of Christ on film, but he had contributed
to television, but they were T Davies and Steven Moffat, enabling a to several Doctor Who fanzines in the 1980s
limited by the degree to comparison of their attitudes to series and 90s. He charted how Doctor Who and
which they could take new mythology and fan and mainstream its fandom had changed since the launch
episodes into account. James audiences, as well as looking at wider issues of Doctor Who Weekly in 1979. “There were
Chapman delayed the delivery such as how political and ‘social realist’ some really important moments to capture,”
of Inside the TARDIS so he content in Doctor Who helped it claim he says, citing “the point where Doctor Who
could include a chapter on the ‘quality’ status. Weekly became Doctor Who Monthly and Jeremy
Christopher Eccleston series.
He would provide substantial
revisions in the second edition, “When the show was off,
Doctor Who fans moved into
published in 2013.
By the time Matt Hills
(now professor of media and
journalism at the University of
Huddersfield) released Triumph more literary fandoms.” Miles Booy
of a Time Lord in January 2010, there were
more than four series of the revived Doctor Hills pondered how twenty-first century Bentham started to interview the production
Who to examine. Triumph of a Time Lord’s Doctor Who was both ‘cult’ and ‘mainstream’, crew and write articles about what a script
exploration of how Doctor Who returned as whereas Miles Booy describes his Love and editor did. We take it for granted now, but
a mass-audience success grew from Hills’ Monsters (2012) as “covering the period people didn’t know these things in 1980.”
earlier publications, as he explains. “It built when Doctor Who went from mainstream to Examining the period when Doctor Who
was off the air allowed Booy to respond
to a school of criticism which argued that

FIRST IN THE FIELD fandom was excluded from the commercial

exploitation of the series. “Fans got to
completely take over the merchandise in a

I
n 1983, John Tulloch and Manuel
Alvarado’s Doctor Who: The
Unfolding Text was presented to
Doctor Who readers as an unusual one-
off, hovering uncertainly in bookshops
alongside Target novelisations and
mainstream non-fiction such as Peter
Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration.
But there was much more to it than
that, as Matt Hills explains.
“It was part of an influential
media studies book series published
by Macmillan, ‘Communications and
Culture’, which had one of cultural
studies’ leading lights, Stuart Hall, as
an executive editor.
“I had a go at reading The Unfolding
Text when it first came out,” Matt
continues,“and, although it was very
difficult for my 12-year-old self, it was
inspiring in the same way that concepts
of entropy or ‘chronic hysteresis’ were
inspiring to me as a child [in the 1980-
81 series of Doctor Who]. So I was
very pleased that John Tulloch
agreed to write a foreword to my
book Triumph of a Time Lord,
and of course the title for 50th
anniversary book – The
Unfolding Event – was also
a very deliberate riff.”
The Unfolding Text shaped the
decisions of other Doctor Who
scholars. James Chapman thinks
it “incredibly important and
influential, but it was written in a
theoretical jargon that put off general
readers” – something he sought to
avoid with his own Inside the TARDIS.
Paul Booth, associate professor of
media and cinema studies at DePaul
University in Chicago, teaches a class
on Doctor Who and, over 30 years
after publication, rarely uses The
Unfolding Text in the classroom. He
does, however, use it when showing
his students Kinda (1982), which was
the subject of the book’s production
study. “What’s incredible,” he says,
“is how it pre-dates a lot of academic
work on other popular culture texts,
by treating Doctor Who as worthy
of study. It opened the doors for
other researchers to look at popular
media too. You don’t see it cited
much anymore, but it really is the
grandfather of Doctor Who research.”
way that was never true of American shows,”
he points out. “Since Doctor Who books were
being written by [well-known fan writers]
like Paul Cornell and Justin Richards, it
seemed as if the gap between fandom,
the show itself and the merchandise had
completely collapsed.”
Among later books to look at fandom
was Fan Phenomena: Doctor Who (2013), a
collection edited by Paul Booth, whose
contributors examined past and current
fan practices such as missing episode
reconstructions, handicrafting and social
media. Indeed, anthologies of essays about
Doctor Who – often with a mix of academic
and non-academic contributors – flourished
in the post-2010 period. One widely praised
collection, The Unsilent Library (2011), was
among the first to concentrate on the Russell
T Davies era.
Although the book was published
under the auspices of the Science Fiction
Foundation – a charity which publishes the
journal Foundation and supports a research

40 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
library at the University of Liverpool
– the editors didn’t see themselves
as science-fiction critics. Antony Keen,
currently lecturer in classical civilisation
at the University of Roehampton, who
edited the volume with Simon Bradshaw
and Graham Sleight, claims that “We were
supported by the SFF, which made us more
SF than some works. If you had asked us if
we were attempting to blend the academic
and the fannish, always a virtue of Foundation,
we would have said yes.” Was the series being
taken more seriously by literary science-
fiction fans at this point? Not really, says
Keen. “When the show was off, the Doctor
Who fans of the 1980s moved into other
more literary fandoms, while remaining
Doctor Who fans. They suddenly found they
had more to write about, and more people
who would listen.”
Academic publication is no protection
from mainstream controversy. Doctor Who
and Race (2013) was one of the largest and
most wide-ranging essay volumes published
on Doctor Who, with chapters on cricket, the
Ood as a slave race, the Church of England
and Australian national identity, among other
angles on prejudice, ethnicity and under-
representation of the non-white and non-
British in Doctor Who. Unfortunately, before
publication, an advance copy seen by the Daily
Mail allowed it to claim that ‘an international
group of academics’ had denounced Doctor
Who as ‘thunderously racist’. The book’s
editor, Lindy Orthia, senior lecturer in science
communication at the Australian National
University, was disappointed. “It wasn’t a
debate, since no-one knew anything at all
about the book and couldn’t buy it to check
for themselves. Once I had pointed out that
the book wasn’t published yet, and cleared
up how a quote had been taken out of context
by the journalist, I got a lot of apologies
from Doctor Who sites and individuals for
jumping the gun.”
In the period since the 50th anniversary
the number of academic books about Doctor
Who has continued to grow. There have been
contributions from fields such as theology,
philosophy and psychology, as well
as from branches of critical theory.
Most recently Lorna Jowett’s
Dancing with the Doctor (2017)
brought gender studies to bear
on Doctor Who (post-2005),
Torchwood and The Sarah
Jane Adventures. Not only are
the feminine and masculine
presentations of regular
characters investigated,
but also the broader gender diversity of each
series, together withsuch topics as the public
service requirements of the BBC in a racially
and gender-diverse United Kingdom.
Why write academic books on Doctor Who?
Leslie McMurtry, a radio drama historian
who has contributed to several Doctor Who
collections, says that it’s “Because of who Above left: Lindy
I am. I’m an academic, I love analysing texts.” Orthia and her 2013
book Doctor Who
How is this different from writing about and Race.
the programme on social media posts or in
Above centre: Lorna
fanzines or (increasingly) talking about it Jowett discusses
on podcasts? “Partly what makes academic gender issues in
writing about Doctor Who academic is putting Dancing with the
what you want to say within the conventions Doctor, published by
of academia: structure, references, IB Tauris in April 2017.
recognising theoretical perspectives, Above right: Captain
historical conditions and production Jack Harkness (John
Barrowman) and Ianto
imperatives. Academic writing about Doctor Jones (Gareth
Who needs to have a sense of humour, and it David-Lloyd) kiss in
End of Days (2007),
the final episode
should try to navigate the boundary between of Torchwood’s
first series.
being self-reflexive (because we wouldn’t be
writing seriously/academically about Doctor Left: Leslie McMurtry
has contributed to
Who if we didn’t love it in the first place) and
several Doctor Who
having something to say that can be more anthologies.
widely applied.”
Far left: Dancing
Melissa Beattie’s PhD thesis examined with the Doctor also
national identity and Torchwood. She has also examines The Sarah
co-edited Impossible Worlds: Impossible Things Jane Adventures,
with Una McCormack and Ross Garner, a which starred
2010 collection on the cultural impact of Elisabeth Sladen.
Doctor Who and its spin-offs. Melissa thinks Below: Impossible
Worlds, Impossible
that future applications might include work
Things (2010) was
on authorship arising from the change of edited by Ross Garner,
Doctor Who showrunner from Steven Moffat Melissa Beattie and
to Chris Chibnall, alongside research into Una McCormack.
how Doctor Who’s makers and
fans use digital platforms. For
her part, Lindy Orthia points
out that “Doctor Who seems
to be a boundless source of
material. I suppose unlike
other long-running shows it’s
not the brainchild of a single
creator, so it’s diverse, and
that’s both why we never tire
of it as viewers and have lots
to say about
it as researchers.”
Clearly then, many more
people will be gaining
their doctorates (and other
degrees) with the help
of the Doctor for years
to come. DWM
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 41 . .
 THE
DWM
INTERVIEW
MAIL
ORDER
MAN
the American stuff I wanted for copies of the
new Doctor Who Weekly,” says John. “He wanted
a hundred copies of each issue – so I got
them. After a few weeks he said, ‘You can send
them in monthly batches.’ Then he wanted
ohn Fitton didn’t plan them every three months and then the whole
J
Opposite page: A
selection of John Fitton
to set up a mail order thing collapsed. That resulted in me having
catalogues and a 1987 company specialising in hundreds of copies of Doctor Who Weekly.
advert that was a Doctor Who merchandise. “At the same time,” he continues, “I came
familiar sight in Doctor He trained as a lawyer and home one evening from working at my father’s
Who Magazine. worked as a law lecturer business to find a rep from [book publisher]
Above: “It was a big before joining his father’s business as a tiling WH Allen waiting for me. He’d somehow
family, really,” says and building contractor. “At the same time,” found out I was selling Doctor Who stuff and
John, looking back on
his time selling Doctor
he says, “almost as a hobby, part-time, I was he did me a really good deal on Doctor Who
Who merchandise. a comics dealer. It was mainly American paperbacks. The biggest thing was that I could
Below: One of John’s
superhero comics published by DC and get each new novelisation six weeks before the
Christmas catalogues Marvel, and we’d trade with American dealers official publication. That meant I could get
from the mid-1980s. to get stock.” them out to customers a month ahead of them
Below right: John The trade worked both ways and in 1979 an being in shops like WH Smith.
bought a Sanyo personal American dealer asked John to supply him with “Finally, Marvel – who published Doctor
computer to help him a new British comics title. “He said he’d trade Who Weekly – put the icing on the cake with
run the business.
“Everything was stored in the garage
– and the loft and the dining room.”
‘Marvel Classifieds’. That was a cheap way to
advertise in all their comics. So I built up the
mail order, working part-time. Then in 1983
I had a choice of keeping the building
business going or doing mail order full-time.
And mail order was a lot easier!”
It was, however, still hard work. “We were
advertising everywhere, fulfilling orders and
then noting down people who asked for
catalogues. My wife, Linda, spent hours
copying out labels. And we
were probably sending out
hundreds of catalogues to
people who never bought
anything – but we couldn’t
track it.”
To help manage the
business, John made a key
investment. “When
I went full-time, I bought
a Sanyo PC – the first
personal computer,
really, that
came at a fair
price. It had
the equivalent
42 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE
. .
For two decades,
John Fitton provided
an essential service
to Doctor Who
fans – supplying
books and other
merchandise direct
to their doors.
INTERVIEW BY
SIMON GUERRIER
of [spreadsheet software] Excel and [word
processing software] Wordstar, and
I started doing my catalogues on it. Then
I bought a dot matrix printer, so they’d
look more professional than doing them
on a duplicator.”
I
n 1984, John was contacted by the
Leeds-based software company
Lumpsoft. “They’d produced an
unofficial Doctor Who computer game on
cassette, The Key to Time, which they wanted
me to stock. We got chatting and it turned
out they were the same guys who’d sold
me the Sanyo system. I told them I was
struggling to get the total benefit from it,
so they said they’d write me a program.”
PJR Harkin, who wrote The Key to Time
text adventure game, then spent “about three
weeks sat in my dining room, writing me
a personal program for storing customers’
names, producing address labels, issuing
invoices, tracking VAT and stuff like that.
That was the big changing point. That was
about 1985.”
John’s company – John Fitton Books and
Magazines – was based at his home, in a
residential cul-de-sac in Hensall, near Goole
in North Humberside. “Everything was
stored in the garage – and in the loft and
the dining room,” he laughs. After spotting
a good deal on Star Wars
merchandise, John’s kitchen
was filled floor to ceiling
with boxes of AT-ATs and
Millennium Falcons. “There
was a foot of space between
them, so you could get to the
cooker, the sink and the
fridge – nothing else.
“We looked at buying
premises. We were going to
lease an office unit, and a lot
of my friends in the business had
gone into shops. We looked at an
old Swinton Insurance building,
which we wouldn’t have opened as
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 43
. .
 THE
DWM
INTERVIEW John Fitton
a shop, just as the base for the
Opposite page: mail order. We were even looking
Catalogues from the
at buying a bigger house but that
early 1990s, and
a picture of John at would have interfered with the
1993’s PanoptiCon kids going to school. So we stuck
event. where we were.”
Right: John’s home What was it like for John’s
was filled with toys children, growing up in a house
like this Star Wars crammed with toys they couldn’t play
Millennium Falcon.
with? “Oh, they had a great time. We’d be
Below: In 1987 the at conventions almost every weekend, and
BBC granted John
they’d play under the tables. When they were
a licence to produce
binders for Doctor older, I got them autograph books and they’d
Who Magazine. go off and get them signed. Because we were
regulars, we got to know a lot of the stars
anyway. Louise Jameson [who played Leela]
was about the same age as my wife and always
came to find us. I remember [Sixth Doctor]
Colin Baker carrying my youngest daughter
around. It was a big family, really.”
This included John’s loyal customers.
“People would come to conventions just to
look me up. In about 1990, we organised
“If you could find a Patrick Troughton
annual in a car boot sale for ten
pence, you could sell it for £40.”
a signing in Leeds – me and Paul Smith, who
produced photographs of Doctor Who actors.
Because we had Sylvester McCoy and Sophie
Aldred coming, we got a mention on Radio
Leeds and expected to draw in local people.
But then we had people coming from Luton
and Croydon – customers of mine who
wanted to be part of it.” He laughs. “Then
again, in those days a ‘cheap day return’ on
the train meant just that, and you could
take yourself and your kids from London to
Yorkshire for a reasonable sum.”
At its peak, John’s mail list had about
6,000 names and addresses. “That sounds
great,” he says, “but by then we’d lost control
of it. Although we had this database, there
was still just me and my wife trying to keep
ahead of everything: the packing, the orders,
going to conventions, all that. Everybody on
the database had bought from us at some
TWO BADGES, A PATCH
AND A BINDER
J
ohn’s business gave want a licence, you’ve got to
him an insight into the pay £1,000 up front for every
state of Doctor Who item.’ So you were out of serious
merchandising in the early money and couldn’t afford to set
1980s. “The big boys weren’t up. But the BBC was the other
interested,” he says. “Hasbro, way round. They’d take seven
Airfix, companies like that, and a half per cent or whatever
didn’t want it.” Instead, in the percentage was, but after
the early 1980s Doctor Who you’d started selling.
merchandise was the domain of “That enabled John McElroy
a number of small businesses. with his photograph business,
“The BBC were great Fine Art Castings [who
with that,” says John. “Other produced Doctor Who miniature
companies were like, ‘If you models], and Stuart Evans with
44 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE
. .
point but we didn’t
know which were regular
customers. We paid about £1,200
a month on postage: £600 on parcels and £600
on catalogues. But how many of them were
getting a catalogue and just chucking it in the
bin? If we’d been able to rewrite our program
so we only sent one out to people who’d
bought from us in the previous six months,
it might have been 2,000 people – which
would have really cut down our overheads.”
Even so, John’s company continued to
grow, year on year, for a decade. “The basis
of our business was us spying good British
material and selling it to the Americans,
Australians and whoever else. We had
customers all over the world. And it worked
the other way, too. We’d buy stuff wholesale
from the States and sell it to the Brits.”
What sold particularly well? “If you could
find a Patrick Troughton annual in a car-boot
sale for ten pence, you could sell it for £40.
That’s great but it was never going to happen
every week. So in our heyday, the bread-
and-butter items that kept us going were
the Doctor Who paperbacks and the special
books written by Peter Haining, because
I got such a discount from WH Allen. We
made good money on them and I had a good
subscription service.
“Then there were the videos. The first
one, Revenge of the Cybermen [released by BBC
Video in 1983], was
£39.99, and then
the ones after that
were £24.99. A lot
his Dalek kits. They put down
foundations, and then others
saw people making money and
that there was an interest. It
blossomed from there.”
In 1987, John himself took
out a licence with the BBC
to produce four Doctor Who
items. “I had to pay something
up front by then. I had two
badges, a stitch-on patch and
a binder for Doctor Who
Magazine – all with the logo
from the time.”
of shops didn’t stock them – they might
order it in for you. But I used to keep two
or three copies of every Doctor Who video
in stock at any time. Between me and
Dave Bromehead at the Sheffield Space
Centre, I think we made up ten or 15 per cent
of the UK market in Doctor Who videos in
the mid-1980s. The killer was when they
dropped the price to £9.99. We’d been getting
a whacking great discount off £24.99, and
now all the shops were stocking them. It was
a double-whammy, but videos were good
while they lasted. The business was winding
down by the time DVDs came in.”
T
he BBC stopped making Doctor
Who after the 1989 series, and over
the next couple of years the line of
novelisations – John’s bread and butter – also
came to an end. But John blames something
else for the change in his business fortunes.
Amazon.com was founded in July 1994
and eBay in September 1995. “With them,
people could get stuff directly,” he says. “And
Amazon were brutal. They heavily discounted
and offered free postage, too. It put small
companies like ours out of business.”
With hindsight, he considers that there
may have been a way forward. “Instead of
just selling general Doctor Who merchandise,
we should have gone really niche, selling the
old and very rare stuff. That way, we might
have continued for longer. But we didn’t, and
we couldn’t compete.”
So what happened to all the boxes that
once filled his house? “That was in the
heyday, in the 1980s. By the mid-nineties,
a lot had gone – all the Star Wars stuff and
the comics. We were just selling Doctor Who
by that time. Basically, I let it run down.
I withdrew in 1999, so I didn’t buy anything
new, and over the next two years just sold off
what I’d got.”
But John looks back on the business
fondly. “It was a nice thing to be part of,” he
says. “Like I said – a family. I’d just like to
thank everyone who supported us.” DWM
 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW

In 1986 Jeremy Bentham earned a place among Doctor

Who’s gamechanging authors with a book that featured
unprecedented analysis of the William Hartnell era.
INTERVIEW BY ANDREW PIXLEY

I
n the late 1970s there were
three authors who proved
inspirational where the
chronicling of television
and radio was concerned.
BBC studio technician
Roger Wilmut mixed fun and
facts in The Goon Show Companion (Robson
Books, 1976). Screenwriter Gary Gerani
assembled incredible data for the first
major telefantasy volume, Fantastic Television
(Harmony, 1977). And the by-line of IBM
techno-wiz Jeremy
Bentham became a
guarantee of wisdom
and information
via the Doctor Who
Appreciation Society
in the same period.
His subsequent book,
Doctor Who: The Early
Years (WH Allen, 1986),
proved a major step
forward in Doctor Who
publishing, taking what
was already a rather
specialist field to a whole
new level.
In terms of large-format books, there
Top left: Jeremy
had been junior behind-the-scenes stuff
Bentham at the party
(Doctor Who: The Making of a Television to celebrate DWM’s
Series by Alan Road; André Deutsch, 400th issue in 2008.
1982), ersatz scientific guides (The Doctor Photo © Peter Ware.
Who Technical Manual by Mark Harris; Above left: Gary
Severn House, 1983) and text-light visual Gerani’s Fantastic
feasts ( John Nathan-Turner and Andrew Television (1977)
was the first major
Skilleter’s Doctor Who: The TARDIS Inside
non-fiction book
Out; Piccadilly Press, 1985). WH Allen, about telefantasy.
meanwhile – having taken over the Target
Above right: Mark
novelisation line from Tandem in 1976 – Harris’ Doctor Who
diverged into large-format hardback Doctor Technical Manual (1983)
Who gift books with autumn releases ideal was an early example of
for the Christmas market. These began an ersatz guide.
in September 1983 with Peter Haining’s Left: Jeremy’s Doctor
Doctor Who: A Celebration, a lavish overview Who: The Early
of the series’ first 20 years. It sold well and Years (1986) was
unprecedented in its
prompted sequels with a similar remit. analysis of the William
But while Haining aimed to service Hartnell episodes.
the entire audience of Doctor Who from
1963 to the present day, what The Early
Years did was rather more daring. It made
the specialist even more specialised.
It narrowed the scope from the show’s
entire history to a three-year period at
its very start. A magical, semi-mythical
era which in 1986 wasn’t accessible to

“Peter Haining kicked me up the

backside and said, ‘Don’t just talk
about this book! Go out and do it!’”
46 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE
. .
most UK fans – aside from a BBC2 repeat when ingenuity and originality filled in for
of the initial four-part story in The Five technical trickery and dazzling digitisation.
Faces of Doctor Who in November 1981

I
and some 16mm prints screened at the n person, Jeremy is just as charming,
National Film Theatre and its affiliates informative and enthusiastic as his
from October 1983. It wouldn’t be until works. “My continuing fascination with
June 1989 that the first Dalek story would Doctor Who,” he says, “has always been that’s
appear on VHS, while the existing William it’s been consistently good entertainment
Hartnell adventures had only started to since the 1960s and has evolved with the
be syndicated in North America in 1985. technology of television and the way in
So Bentham’s book was a celebration of which programmes are made. So I conveyed
things that barely existed, willing them this message in reverse by peeling back to
back through time through the medium the very beginning, in this tiny little studio
of memory. somewhere in West London, the most
Indeed, the notion of time travel unlikely place you’d ever expect a dream
pervades the text, opening with an evocative
introduction in which the contemporary Above: Ian Chesterton
studio space of the 1980s fades away and the (William Russell),
reader tumbles back through the decades to Barbara Wright
(Jacqueline Hill)
and Susan Foreman
(Carole Ann Ford) in
The Firemaker (1963),
the final episode of
100,000 BC (aka An
Unearthly Child).
Left: Barbara, Ian and
the Doctor (William
Hartnell) explore an
alien building in The
Sea of Death, the first
episode of The Keys of
Marinus (1964). The
story was designed by
Raymond Cusick.

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 47 . .

 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW Jeremy Bentham

“What a lot of people might

forget is that – prior to the
1980s – photographs of Doctor
Who were quite rare.”
ideas that came together. My big project in behind-the-scenes shots. And I thought that
1983 was interviewing all the producers of we could produce a coffee-table book on the
Doctor Who from Verity Lambert up to John images alone, never mind the text.”
Nathan-Turner for a Doctor Who Monthly

factory to be started. And look what came
out of it!”
Jeremy had already assisted author Peter
Haining on his Doctor Who books. “Peter and
I got on like a house on fire,” he says. “He was
very good at mentoring me in all the things
Top: Raymond Cusick
poses with the famous
I didn’t know about, because fans hadn’t
creatures he designed. really gone that far with books at the time.
Photo © Phil Bevan. He gave me his time to show how to do
Above and top right: things, like how you go from an initial idea to
Jeremy’s Early Years something you can print. He demonstrated
proposal highlighted how it was possible rather than impossible.
the importance of He kicked me up the backside and said,
Cusick’s archive and the
‘Don’t just talk about this book! Go out and
involvement of Doctor
Who’s co-creator do it! There’s no reason why you can’t.’”
Sydney Newman. The finished work, studying the era of the
First Doctor, was the product “of a couple of
Winter Special. This made me realise just
how much creativity goes into the series.
Out of that arose all these questions about
how remarkable it was that in 1963 Doctor
Who came up with something that made it so
radically different to and more engaging than
other television series which had gone before,
like ABC’s Pathfinders series. Doctor Who had
a new way of presenting drama that wasn’t
quite for children and wasn’t quite for adults.
It electrified my imagination when it started.
“So out of these interviews came the idea
to interview the talents that were brought
to bear on Doctor Who – to find out how the
programme was designed, trying to distinguish
between roles such as producer and director,
how the sound design was achieved, and the
early days of video effects such as the firing of
the Dalek gun – or ‘electrocution gun’, as
I wrote in my diary in 1963.”
But the book was groundbreaking not just
for its words. “The second aim of the book
came from going to a convention where
Raymond Cusick was displaying his photo
archive of the first Dalek story and all the
other stories he’d designed – including all his
C
ontextualising genre publishing of the
day, Jeremy points out that “What a lot
of people might forget is that – prior to
the 1980s – photographs of Doctor Who were
quite rare. Partly because there weren’t that
many in circulation, but also the technology
of the time made printing photographs quite
challenging, if not expensive. It was only
with books like Doctor Who: A Celebration that
graphic techniques allowed printing of this
material at a price that wouldn’t break the
bank. Being aware of Ray’s vast archive from
the early days of the programme, part of
the idea of doing a book was not only to tell
people more about the show’s origins, but also
to illustrate it in a way that hopefully would
do justice to the creative talents involved.”
In late 1983, the proposal for Doctor Who:
The Early Years, to be written by Jeremy and
Ray and focusing on the development of the
series up to 1966, was submitted to WH Allen
editor Christine Donougher. “It wasn’t that
long afterwards that Nigel Robinson came
in and he was tremendously instrumental
in getting it commissioned,” says Jeremy.
Following other commitments, including

48 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .

helping Haining with the Celebration follow-up
The Key to Time, Jeremy finally signed a contract
on 8 March 1985, with a target delivery date
of 31 July and a projected publication date
of some time after April 1986. “Luckily I had
purchased a good old BBC Micro B computer
in 1984, so I could go back and revise things
without having to tear up sheets of paper
bashed out on the old golf-ball typewriter.”
W
hat is Jeremy’s happiest memory
of the venture? “I think it was how
supportive everybody was.
I don’t think I had a single turn-down.
Sydney Newman [former BBC Head of
Drama and one of the series’ creators] wrote
a letter to me dated 30 April 1984 which was
nine pages long! He almost wrote the whole of
his originator’s chapter there and then; all
I had to do was contextualise some of it.
Then [director] Christopher Barry dug out
his telesnaps from The Power of the Daleks and
I suddenly thought, ‘Gosh! I would really,
really like to print a page from one of those!’
The designer said: ‘That’s the end of the
book, isn’t it?’ It was the perfect end to the
Hartnell era. And that’s why there was this
perception at the time that there was going
to be The Early Years 2, which would cover
Patrick Troughton and so on. That wasn’t the
idea, although I must admit it was tempting.”
With a cover design in which an
incongruous 1980s tube-lighting logo
hovered over mottled artefacts from two
decades earlier, Doctor Who: The Early Years
was made available to an appreciative,
ABSENT FRIENDS allowed to
contribute to
the book. That
J
eremy Bentham has especially There’s a lovely photograph of was Chris all
fond memories of two people the set model from The Romans the way, right
who collaborated with him on which just opened my eyes so up to the end.
The Early Years – designer Raymond much to the skills a good director The last time
Cusick and director Christopher Barry. brings to a programme. Chris had I saw him
“With Ray, it was my opportunity a photographic archive of his was at the
to correct what I always thought own which he allowed me to use. Doctor Who
was a little bit of an injustice. Terry His lovely liquid lunches were a highly Celebration at the ExCeL in November
Nation – brilliant scriptwriter though enjoyable part of the project, and he 2013, where he was still delighting
he was – wrote a paragraph on a even wrote to thank me for being fans with his stories.”
page, but Ray’s actual design of the
Dalek is, rather like the Concorde
or the Mini Cooper, something very
radical and so memorable that it was
an instantaneous hit. Yet Ray got one
ex-gratia payment. So I was very, very
happy for Ray to use his photographs
to get a little more financial recognition
via the books deal, and more
importantly worldwide recognition for
designing something which is still the
blueprint for what thrills audiences
today. It was a wonderful opportunity
to right that wrong.
“Christopher Barry went way above
what one expected, because there was
so much that he had saved himself.
Top left: Sydney
Newman pictured
in 1964.
Top right: Director
enthusiastic and well-established fan base in Christopher Barry was
May 1986. The production art was revealed another of Jeremy’s
collaborators.
as expansive, with sumptuous double spreads Photo © Marcus Hearn.
allowing the reader to marvel over the pencil
Above centre:
strokes that crafted everything from a home Christopher’s model
fit for Morpho brains (The Keys of Marinus) of a set from 1965’s
to the wreckage of the UK 201 (The Rescue). The Romans.
In addition, a sliver of glossy colour inserts Above: A spread
brought to vivid life buried Daleks, Skaro from The Early Years
landscapes and the exotic city of Morphoton. covering the Cusick
“I could pick it up now,” says Jeremy, “and stories The Chase
(1965) and The
think, ‘Oh gosh! There’s so much we’ve learnt
Mutants (aka The
since then with all the research that other Daleks, 1963-64). Also
people have done down the years.’ Seeing it featured is Cusick’s
visually is still the right way to go. With the sketch of an (ultimately
information, technology and photographic unseen) Dalek mutant.
access we had at the time, I think, yes, it did Left: The Early Years
work. And the great thing I’m proud of is that also included Cusick’s
original designs for
it never, ever got remaindered. WH Allen did
the Keys of Marinus’
expensive leather-bound editions and they all Morpho brains.
sold as well!” DWM
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 49 . .
 THE

The Power
DWM
INTERVIEW

of Three
David J Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker are jointly
responsible for more Doctor Who reference books than any other authors.
INTERVIEW BY PAUL SCOONES

D
avid J Howe, Mark to date has written six guide books to recent I wanted also to find out more about how it
Stammers and Doctor Who series, from Third Dimension was made.” Stephen’s motivation was much
Stephen James (2007) to Time of the Doctor (2016). the same. “I was always keen to learn as
Walker have made “I’ve always been a great fan of the much about the show as I could – including
a huge contribution behind the scenes elements of television about how it was made,” he points out.
to documenting the and film,” says David, “so it was natural “It’s just a subject that fascinates me.”
production history and that as I found out more about Doctor Who Mark, a designer by training, had an
critical reception of Doctor Who. interest in the series that was “initially
David, Mark and Stephen began writing more visual – the logos, title sequences
Doctor Who reference books for Virgin and photos taken during production.”
Publishing with The Sixties (1992), The In 1987 the trio created The Frame,
Seventies (1994), The Eighties (1996) and a high-quality fanzine that helped establish
The Handbook series (1992-97). David also their reputation for outstanding research,
Main image: William wrote Timeframe (1993), Companions (1995, writing and design. “The Frame was hugely
Hartnell in a picture with Mark Stammers) and I am the Doctor important,” says Stephen, “not least because
from the camera
(1996, with Jon Pertwee). For BBC Books, it demonstrated to Peter Darvill-Evans, the
rehearsal of The
Survivors (1963), the David wrote A Book of Monsters (1997) and Doctor Who editor at Virgin, the high standard
second episode of collaborated with Stephen on The Television of work that David, Mark and I were capable
The Mutants (aka Companion (1998). David and Stephen of producing, and the professional attitude
The Daleks). then established their own company, Telos we brought to all our projects.”
Below: Issues 1 and Publishing (www.telos.co.uk), and continue to “Visually, The Frame was very important,”
15 of The Frame from publish Doctor Who reference books to this Mark adds. “Steve wanted to be able
February 1987 and day. David has written Howe’s Transcendental to print the large collection of set
August 1990. The
magazine set a high
Toybox (2000, with Arnold T Blumberg) photographs and other image rarities
standard for Doctor and The Target Book (2007, with Tim Neal). he’d amassed over the years. David’s
Who fan publications. Stephen compiled the three-volume collection also contained some
interview collection Talkback (2006-07) and wonderful imagery, and to both their

50 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
credits they wanted to share these with
like-minded fans rather than hoard them.”
“We’d proved that we could write, edit
and design something to a professional
standard,” says David, “and so we found
ourselves talking to Peter about the books
and, almost jokingly, about why he hadn’t
commissioned us to do anything yet. Peter’s
reply was that it was because we hadn’t
submitted anything.”
After their initial pitch to Virgin for
a book about the Daleks ran into rights
issues, the aspiring authors came up with
the idea for The Sixties, which proved to
be the most authoritative account to that
date of Doctor Who’s black-and-white era.
“We just wanted to create a book which
documented the series accurately,” David
explains. “Many of the previous books
had relied on third-hand information
and memories, and there were a lot of
assumptions and mistakes made by the
authors in doing so. There was a lot of
‘assumed fact’ around Doctor Who as
no-one had ever actually taken the trouble
to find out what the real facts were. We
also knew we wanted to present as many
“There was a lot of ‘assumed
fact’ around Doctor Who as
no-one had ever actually taken
the trouble to find out what the
real facts were.” David J Howe
pictures as we could and the rarer
Left: The acclaimed
the better.” Doctor Who: The Sixties
Stephen adds, “I’ve always been (1992) was the first
a perfectionist, so my aim was book by the Howe-
simply to make the book as good as Stammers-Walker team.
it could possibly be, and I’m sure the Below: These pages
same was true for David and Mark from the original
too. We were certainly aware that proposal document
show that the project
nothing quite like it had ever been
was always intended to
attempted before, and we wanted be a trilogy.
to make it as comprehensive and
authoritative as we could.”
Writing The Sixties was,
according to Mark, “pretty evenly
split” between the three authors,
although Mark also took on the
work of designing the book’s
layout. “The design was actually
covered under a separate contract.
It led to me designing many of the
large-format Doctor Who books
Virgin put out.”
The Sixties, though thoroughly and
meticulously researched, was based on
interviews and available documentation.
It was one of the last major Doctor Who
reference books produced before access
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 51 . .
 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW The Power of Three
was granted to the BBC’s Written Archives
Right: The first
edition of Howe and
Centre (WAC). This repository of original
Walker’s The Television paperwork opened the floodgates to many
Companion was new discoveries about the production history
published by BBC of the series. “Access to the files at Caversham
Books in 1998. did certainly make a huge difference,”
Far right: The First concedes Stephen, “and of course the
Doctor Handbook was presumption is that documentary evidence
originally published by
is generally more reliable than information
Virgin in 1994.
gleaned from interviews conducted years,
Below: A sample page
layout, cover ideas and
if not decades, after the event, given the
the announcement of tendency of people to misremember things.”

I
the Daleks book in The
Frame. The authors had n addition to The Sixties and the two
a publishing agreement follow-up ‘decades’ books, David, Mark
but the project came up
and Stephen also collaborated on The
against insurmountable
rights issues. Handbooks, a series of small-format books
focusing on a single Doctor’s era in greater
depth and with critical appraisals of each
story. The Handbook: The First Doctor was
the first to make full use of the WAC
documentation, with a lengthy Production
Diary section written by Stephen that
presented an exceptionally detailed timeline
of events.
David and Stephen’s The Television
Companion is a guide to the entire series, pre-existing reviews, covering all the most influence the quotes we chose to select for
as it existed in 1998. As Stephen explains, commonly discussed aspects of that story, inclusion. For every story, you can find
the book had a different aim to their earlier in order to form a sort of critical overview. reviews that absolutely slate it, and also
works – “specifically, to present a critical We tried to be as balanced as possible, conversely reviews that praise it to the skies.”
analysis of the stories rather than a behind- by including both positive and negative Both The Television Companion and The
the-scenes production history, although comments, without being too influenced Handbook have been reissued by Telos
we did also include a certain amount of by our own opinions on the stories – and Publishing. The aim with these editions was,
production information. The idea was that naturally David and I didn’t always see eye as David explains, “to try and make them
for each story we would compile a selection to eye on those! To some extent, though, the definitive guides. We realised that the
of short, fully attributed quotes from it was inevitable that our own views would new edition of The Television Companion could

DENIAL OF THE DALEKS

been a fantastic book “To say we were disappointed would be

with a lot of wide appeal
amongst casual as well as
hardcore fans. Probably
the closest book like it was
David Banks’ Cybermen.”
However, just one day
before the contracts
proposal, contents list, were due to be signed, Terry Nation’s
sample chapter and agent declined approval for the
cover designs, and Peter [Darvill-Evans] was book. The international rights were
an understatement,” says David. “However,
Peter said that he liked our work, the ideas
behind Daleks were good and so he still
wanted us to do something. We came up with
about a dozen ideas, and combined several
into a format which became The Sixties.”

B
efore The Sixties, the
Howe-Stammers-Walker plan
was to write a different book
for Virgin Publishing, simply titled Daleks.
As David explains, “We came up with a
pleased and keen to do the book.”
“Tony Clark had produced some
wonderful line illustrations of the Dalek
casings,” Mark adds, “showing the changes
through each story and era. It would have
held by the American publishers of
another title, The Official Doctor Who
and the Daleks Book, preventing the
publication of a second reference
book on the same subject.

52 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
be enhanced with some of the production
information from The Handbook… So what we
did was to pull the fictional and story-by-story
transmission elements from The Handbook
and include them in The Television Companion.
Also, in preparing both books for Telos, we
went back to the original files and reinstated
everything which had had to be cut in order
to fit the original books. In total the Telos
Handbook has something like 10,000 more
words than the original Virgin editions.”
In recent years, Stephen has been writing
guide books for each series of modern Doctor
Who. The approach is rather different from that
taken with his earlier reference works. “Rather
than giving an insider’s behind-the-scenes
account of the production, they cover the
show from the ‘outside looking in’ perspective
of the viewing public,” Stephen explains. “The
first main section of each book comprises
a chronological record of all the official
announcements, public appearances, press
reports, television coverage etc that took place
during the year in question, while the second
main section presents a full episode guide to
“It’s all about whether the readers
like and enjoy the books, whether
they want to read them and want
to find out more.” David J Howe
that year’s series, including
a lengthy critical analysis
of each episode. People
sometimes ask why David
and I haven’t written
a new edition of The
Television Companion covering
the twenty-first-century
episodes, but really, in
many ways, that’s what
these annual episode
guide books are – a more
detailed, series-by-series,
twenty-first-century equivalent
of The Television Companion.”
W
ith so much
having been
written about
Doctor Who, in particular the original run of
the series, has everything been as thoroughly
researched as humanly possible? “I’d be
surprised if any very significant further
discoveries were made now,” Stephen says.
“Every major contributor to the show who
could possibly be interviewed has been
interviewed, usually multiple times, and every Above left: The
surviving file of production paperwork has Television Companion
been thoroughly scrutinised. I think we now was reissued as
have a pretty full picture of the production an updated but
of the 1963-89 episodes.” David believes unauthorised edition
by Howe and Walker’s
there are “always more things to discover,
Telos Books in 2003.
but certainly as far as basic production
Above right: The
information goes there isn’t much more to
2016 edition of The
know. Of course the ultimate would be to Handbook Volume Two,
have all the missing episodes found. Being published by Telos.
able to actually see the stories is a great help
Below left: Page one
in researching and writing about them!” of the manuscript for
With so many Doctor Who reference books the Daleks book and
to their names, is there one that particularly a rough cover design.
stands out? “I’m satisfied with all of them!” Below right:
says David, smiling. “It’s all about whether the David J Howe, Mark
Stammers and Stephen
readers like and enjoy the books, whether they
James Walker at the
find them interesting to read and want to find London launch of The
out more – that’s the acid test. So far I hope Seventies in 1994.
that I’ve not let anyone down with anything
I’ve been commissioned to write about the
show.” Stephen takes a similar view: “I prefer
to look back at my Doctor Who research and
writing as an overall body of work,” he says,
“and I’m enormously proud of all of it.”
For Mark though, it’s The Sixties. “There’s
something special about that book to me. Its
design is quite simple really, but that allowed
the contents of the book to come to the
fore. It really was the embodiment of what
we’d hoped to achieve with The Frame, but
enlarged upon in book form. But it would
still be nice to do the Dalek book after all
these years...” DWM
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 53 . .
 Inside the
ARCHIVES With the television series seemingly over,
Doctor Who Magazine provided dedicated fans with the most
detailed series of retrospective articles it had ever attempted.
W
ith Doctor Who off the air and no
sign of it returning any time
soon, the early 1990s might
have seemed like a bad time
to be a Doctor Who fan. But
in many ways, fans reached
new heights of productivity in
this decade – and one of the areas in which
this manifested itself was in the chronicling
Above: Editor John of Doctor Who’s production.
Freeman tailored the Doctor Who is without doubt one of the
content of Doctor most scrutinised television series ever made,
Who Magazine to
dedicated fans.
and the professional publication of in-depth
studies largely began in the 1990s. Sources
Below: The first
of information such as the BBC Written
Archive, for the 1966
story The Power of the Archives Centre were beginning to become
Daleks, appeared in more easily accessible to outside researchers,
DWM issue 180. and perhaps the fact that the series now
Opposite page: The existed – for the time being, at least – as
beginning of this new a complete body of work added to the
feature was announced
on the front cover,
attraction of preparing such histories.
In books, Virgin Publishing began work on
which featured artwork
by Alister Pearson. its acclaimed series of reference works. And at
Doctor Who Magazine, in 1991 editor John
54 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE
. .
FEATURE BY PAUL HAYES
Freeman initiated one of the longest-lasting
and most ambitious series of regular articles
– the Archives, by Andrew Pixley. The aim: to
tell the history of the production of each and
every Doctor Who story, one per issue, until all
150-plus had been covered.
The magazine had contained archive
features in the past by writers such as Jeremy
Bentham, Richard Marson and Richard
Landen. But Andrew’s research efforts and
the level of detail afforded to each story took
this new series to a new level. The features
“The desire to research
arose simply from the fact
that I generally want to
know more about something
if I admire it.” Andrew Pixley
began with The Power of the Daleks (1966)
in issue 180, cover-dated October 1991.
“I’d joined Doctor Who Magazine at
the invitation of John Freeman in January
1988,” Andrew explains. “At that time, my
main focus was working in the telecoms
industry, but during my time at university,
as a hobby I had started to research and write
about numerous British television series with
a science-fiction or fantasy element. Much
of this work appeared in a fanzine called
Time Screen, but I was also writing guides
and articles for the Gerry Anderson fanzine
SiG, for Number Six – which was a fanzine
about The Prisoner – and for the British Film
Institute’s television magazine Primetime.
“The desire to research arose simply from
the fact that I generally want to know more
about something if I admire it. ‘Where did
the inspiration come from, how was it made,
how was it received when it was originally
broadcast...?’ That sort of thing. And if such
information didn’t exist, I was sufficiently
interested to go out and find out about it
from newspapers, magazines and the like.”
When Andrew’s Archives were launched
in 1991, increasingly detailed information
about the production history of Doctor
Who had been appearing in fanzines such
as In-Vision and The Frame for some time.
Unlike many other fan publications, these
concentrated less on fiction or critical
comment, and more on how the programmes
themselves were made, and many of their
contributors had written about, or would go
on to write about, the history of Doctor Who
on a more professional basis.
“I came into contact with numerous fans
trying to detail the show – many of whom
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 55
. .
 Inside the Archives
Right: The Archive
for The Rescue (1965)
in issue 225 and The
Dæmons (1971) in
issue 241.
Below: Gary Russell
took over from John
Freeman and saw
the Archives as a
collectable feature of
the magazine.

“The Archives looked hideous in the format

I brought on board as
writers for DWM,” John
Freeman recalls. “I didn’t want
the level of detail a specialist
title like In-Vision afforded,
but I did think The Frame, and
others, had it right in terms of
appealing to Doctor Who’s core
fan group at the time. I was
keen to bring more detailed
background features to the magazine and felt
Below left: The Archive Andrew was more than capable of delivering
for Castrovalva (1982)
such material – which he did, in style.”
in issue 258 included
It was an idea Gary Russell stuck with
when he took over from John in 1992, and he
felt it held several advantages.
“I liked the regularity of the positioning,”
says Gary. “It made mapping 13 issues
a year less of a headache if it was laid out on
the same skeleton every month. Do I think
people really pulled-out-and-kept? Not
remotely. But making it like a reference
partwork seemed the right way to go. It had
its drawbacks – Archives on shorter stories
such as The Rescue [1965] or Planet of Giants
[1964] are not going to run, in wordage
terms, as long as The Ambassadors of Death
I inherited,” says Gary Gillatt. “Were readers
expected to pull them out and put them in
a folder? I never met anyone who did.
And then you had the tele-snaps wrapped
around the eight pages of the Archive. Was
every section of the magazine to be filleted
and filed? Doctor Who had a few more years
of creative life left in it, I felt, before we
surrendered to making a partwork.”
This change also had the benefit of solving
one of the issues which Gary Russell had
previously identified.
“Gary Gillatt’s perceptive move to lose
the pull-out format was a stroke of genius,”
says Andrew. “It freed up the magazine as

O
a box-out on the
unmade story Project ne unusual feature of the Archives when (1970) or The Seeds of Doom [1976]. And a whole to be more adventurous, which was
Zeta Sigma. compared to other DWM content shorter stories weren’t easily padded out what was needed in 1996, but it also gave
Below right: The was their presentation, initially, as with photos. So I think that put a strain on us more flexibility of approach because by
archive for The Three a pull-out-and-keep feature on the magazine’s Andrew, which I didn’t initially foresee.” then we were understanding the limitations
Doctors (1972-73) in centre pages. This had been John’s decision After Gary Gillatt became editor in 1995, of the structure being either too short or too
issue 260 featured at the outset of the run in 1991. “It was very however, the format did change, and anyone long for certain serials. One of Doctor Who’s
box-outs on William
Hartnell and the Gell
much a decision to give it a separate identity. who was indeed carefully removing the strengths as a series is that it’s so flexible –
guard costumes. My hope was that further down the road we Archives from DWM to save them separately and to reflect this flexibility in the way we
might collect them, with additional material.” was about to be disappointed. told its story was a boon.”

BOXING
CLEVER
W
hen Gary Gillatt changed
the format of the Archives
in 1996, he didn’t simply
remove them from the centre pages; he
changed the visual style, and how some of
the information was presented.
“I gave the Archives a few box-outs and
design bits and bobs to make it look livelier
on the page, to better fit in with the more
dynamic design of the magazine from issue
250 onwards. Happily, the timeline style of
the Archives format allowed those box-outs
– on casting options, say, or costume design
– to present themselves quite readily.
“Andrew was less thrilled with my
experimentation, bringing in interview
box-outs and sidebars. And looking back,
he was completely right. They were forced
and arbitrary, and I seem to recall they fell
away very quickly.”

56 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
 ARCHIVE EXTRAS
T
owards the end of the run of the
Archives, Andrew Pixley branched
out into covering not just Doctor
Who serials from the main run, but also
productions such as the 1993 documentary
30 Years in the TARDIS and, from the
same year, the Children in Need special
Dimensions in Time.
“When there were minimal other items
to catalogue beyond the main series – such
as movies, the odd documentary, a few
radio and stage projects, and so on – it was
felt that these made acceptable appendices
to what was then a finite whole,” Andrew
says. “Certainly I was very keen to
document these, as I strongly believe that
such ventures should be celebrated and
preserved. There would be less of a debate
about this now, because the market’s more
diverse and malleable.”

“The Archives are an unparalleled

Aside from design and positioning within
the magazine, the format of the Archives
remained consistent throughout the feature’s
12-year run. There would be a short synopsis
of each episode of the story, followed by
detailed information about the conception,
writing and production of the serial as
a whole, covering all aspects of its making.
But even though every story was to be
covered, it wasn’t done in order. From issue
to issue the stories would alternate back and
forth between different Doctors and eras.
Gary Russell recalls how the schedule was
organised during his time in charge.
“I had a long list of all the stories pinned
to the wall, with the ones we’d done crossed
out. I would balance everything against what
VHS releases the BBC were doing across
12 months – we’d either tie-in directly, or
go in the opposite direction. So if I had an
interview that tied in with the VHS, Andrew’s
Archive would be as far removed from that
VHS as possible. If I had nothing else, or
some amazing photos, then the Archive and
the VHS would tie-in. But – and it’s a big but
– I was also guided by what Andrew wanted.
There was no point in saying ‘Give me Mind
of Evil’ if Andrew felt he had yet to gather
together enough of the right info on The Mind
of Evil. Our primary concern was accuracy.”
achievement in the world
of Doctor Who research
and journalism.” Gary Gillatt
McCormack. So how did he feel about it all
coming to an end?
“I was delighted when we submitted
the ‘final’ piece on the first Dalek story
in early 2003, because I felt that Doctor
Who Magazine had managed to achieve
something in terms of documenting the
history of a very important series, and that
all the support of the editors – John Freeman,
Gary Russell, Marcus Hearn, Gary Gillatt,
Alan Barnes and Clayton Hickman – and the
cleverness of the designers like Peri Godbold
across 12 years had paid off. We’d gone the
distance without letting down either the
readership or the series itself.”
Gary Gillatt sums up what he feels is the
importance of Andrew’s contribution to
the history of Doctor Who research,
and to the continued existence
of DWM.
“The Archives are an
unparalleled achievement in the
world of Doctor Who research and
journalism,” he declares. “Andrew
was way ahead of his time, both
in his approach and in the resources he drew
upon for his work. I’ve never worked with
a more dependable or genial writer. And
the Archives were just a part of Andrew’s
contribution to DWM. We’d be on the
phone to him every day with question after
question, and I believe that relationship
continues to this day. DWM, as a whole,
owes much of its longevity and continuing
success to Andrew.” DWM

“P
art-way into the period of working
with Gary Russell, we took a more
scientific approach,” says Andrew.
“A mix of the remaining stories, blended with
availability of research material, and Gary’s
superb instinct for the show as a whole. We
had a minimum of 12 months to work on any
Top: The Archive Extras
one feature. But a full plan for a year allowed
for 1993’s Dimensions
flexibility on one or two titles which could be in Time (issue 324) and
brought into the mix if needed. The Dæmons the 1977 documentary
[1971] – one of my favourite stories and very Whose Doctor Who
highly regarded by so many people – could be (issue 330).
readied relatively quickly as a tribute to Jon Above: DWM
Pertwee in 1996, replacing The Ambassadors editor Gary Gillatt
of Death.” restructured the
Archive features in
After 12 years, with Doctor Who only having the mid-1990s.
returned for a brief one-off appearance for
Left: The new format
the 1996 TV Movie, the Archives concluded began in issue 250
in issue 331 in May 2003. Andrew had with the 1975 classic
written or co-written every single feature, Genesis of the Daleks.
sharing duties on two of the stories with Una

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 57 . .

 A Brief
History of Time
Some of Doctor Who’s most dedicated fans and historians have spent
years trying to untangle the series’ haphazard continuity.
FEATURE BY MATT MICHAEL

E
fforts to harmonise the The Tenth Planet (1966) and the more robotic defeated the Great Vampires (in State of Decay,
inconsistencies in the Cybermen of the Second Doctor stories. 1980), betrayed Omega, invented regeneration,
Doctor’s history However, it was in the 1990s, during the and crossed swords with a mysterious stranger
began in the 1970s. series’ long absence from television, that a from Gallifrey’s future – who is strongly
Questions such as ‘How whole series of books exploring the ‘in-universe hinted to be the Doctor.
Below left: John Peel’s could Atlantis have been history’ of the Doctor’s travels was published. The Terrestrial Index includes a 50-page
The Gallifrey Chronicles
included extracts from
destroyed three times?’ (in Two of the most influential were published in ‘History of Mankind According to Doctor Who’.
‘The Scrolls of Rassilon’. 1966-67’s The Underwater Menace, 1971’s The 1991 –The Gallifrey Chronicles by John Peel and Lofficier presents a timeline of Earth’s history
The book was published Dæmons and 1972’s The Time Monster) have The Terrestrial Index by Jean-Marc Lofficier. from its creation in 5.5 billion BC until its
in October 1991. inspired many writers to try to reconcile the The Gallifrey Chronicles is presented as destruction in the 57th Segment of Time.
Below right: Also various points of view. a comprehensive history of the Doctor’s Lofficier tries to address inconsistencies such
published in 1991, A notable early attempt was by former story planet and people, bringing together all the as Earth having an interplanetary empire in
The Terrestrial Index editor Gerry Davis in the prologue to Doctor information revealed to that point and mixing the twenty-fifth century (as seen in Colony in
by Jean-Marc Lofficier
Who and the Cybermen (1974), his novelisation in a lot of speculation. It’s most memorable Space, 1971) and yet apparently being confined
was an exploration of
the series’ ‘in-universe’ of the 1967 story The Moonbase. This brief, for the final section, ‘The Scrolls of Rassilon’, to the Solar System until the ‘Great Break Out’
history. two-page summary attempted to explain the which is presented as Time Lord President in the year 5000 (The Invisible Enemy, 1977).
link between the cloth-faced Mondasians of Rassilon’s secret diary. Rassilon reveals how he The Terrestrial Index was a standard reference

The Gallifrey Chronicles is most

memorable for the final section, ‘The
Scrolls of Rassilon’, which is presented as
Time Lord President Rassilon’s secret diary.

58 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
 A Brief History of Time

they encounter the Doctor. Banks’ theories
were also influential on the Virgin novels,
particularly Killing Ground by Steve Lyons
(1996) and Banks’ own Iceberg (1993).
While these volumes all attempted to
provide comprehensive histories – of Time
Lords, human beings and Cybermen –
Intervention Agency, the organisation first
mentioned as a joke in 1976’s The Deadly
Assassin. This notion proved so pervasive
that Terrance Dicks, the co-writer of 1969’s
The War Games, adopted it for his 2005 novel
World Game.

M
for many writers of Virgin Publishing’s subsequent books tended to focus only ore recently, About Time, an unofficial
Above: Doctor Who:
Cybermen was written New and Missing Adventures (1991-97), and so on the most controversial or perplexing series of books by Tat Wood and
by David Banks and first several of Lofficier’s theories were woven in to continuity puzzles. The Discontinuity Guide by Lawrence Miles published since
published by Who Dares the series’ developing in-universe history. Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping 2004, has gone into an impressively obsessive
in September 1990. A third key reference work had originally (1995) is an overview of all the TV adventures level of detail. Each TV story is covered
Above centre: The been published in 1988. Cybermen, written of the first seven Doctors. Each story includes in depth, with sections on ‘History’ to try
book used diagrams to
by David Banks and beautifully illustrated a section headed ‘Continuity’ and attempts to to date them to within days of when they
help tell the story of the
Cybermen’s evolution. by Andrew Skilleter, tells the real-life story of provide an in-universe date for each, however might be set. (For instance, The Sea Devils is
Above right: The
cybernetics and provides behind-the-scenes vague. For example, 1969’s The Seeds of Death is set in autumn, and must take place between
Discontinuity Guide information about the Cybermen television ‘21st Century, probably some time after 2070’. November 1969 and October 1974 because
by Paul Cornell, Martin episodes. Banks also includes a section The writers also include mini-essays to the Master is seen watching an episode
Day and Keith Topping called ‘Archive: A History of the Cyber address various ‘discontinuities’. For instance, of the Clangers!) The books also include
was first published in
Race’. Written from the point of view of an they come up with an ingenious idea of a lengthy essays on such subjects as ‘What’s
May 1995.
‘ArcHivist’ called Hegelia, this history ties ‘Season 6B’ to explain how, in 1983’s The Five the Timeline of the Earth Empire?’ and ‘How
Below: The dates don’t
add up – the Brigadier
together the Cybermen’s origins on Mondas, Doctors, the Second Doctor can remember the Badly Did Dalek History Suffer?’ (after the
(Nicholas Courtney) as he their proliferation and evolution through the circumstances of his own regeneration before Doctor’s interference in the 1975 story Genesis
appeared in The Invasion galaxy, their arrival on the planet Telos, and it has happened. The authors theorise that he of the Daleks), with comprehensive attention
(1968) and Mawdryn their final extinction, trying to explain why was snatched from the Time Lord court and paid to the minutiae of background details,
Undead (1983).
the Cybermen look so different each time became an agent of the Gallifreyan Celestial off-hand references and informed speculation.

UNIT DATING: the problem

D
octor Who’s most controversial
and enduring chronological
conundrum has foxed even
the most assiduous of the programme’s
chroniclers. Put simply, it boils down to
this – when exactly are the UNIT stories set?
It’s such an infamous enigma it was even
referred to in The Day of the Doctor (2013),
when Kate Stewart calls up to ask for “One
of my father’s incident files. Codenamed
Cromer. Seventies or eighties depending on
the dating protocol.”
The nub of the problem goes right back
to the first UNIT story, 1968’s The Invasion,
which, we’re told, is set ‘about four years’
after The Web of Fear. And The Web of
Fear is set ‘over 40 years’ after the Great
Intelligence’s first attack, in The Abominable
Snowmen – a story that’s explicitly set in
1935. So the very first UNIT story takes place
in about 1979. All the way through the Third
Doctor’s UNIT stories, there is no explicit
reference to the date, but the production
team generally claimed it was set sometime
in the near future when BBC3, colour video
phones, and manned Mars missions are
routine. That protocol lasted as late as
1975’s Pyramids of Mars, when Sarah
Jane tells the Fourth Doctor quite
clearly that she is from 1980.
However, by 1983’s Mawdryn
Undead the UNIT stories had
been ret-conned to take
place in the 1970s, with the
Brigadier stated to have
retired in 1976 – that is,
three years before his
supposed first adventure.

60 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
 Far left: The third
volume of About Time,
Lawrence Miles and
Tat Wood’s epic survey
of Doctor Who.
Left centre: A spread
from Steve Tribe’s A
Brief History of Time
Lords, illustrating the
game board and the
Scrolls of Rassilon from
The Five Doctors (1983).
Left: James Goss and
Steve Tribe’s A History
of the Universe in 100
Objects was published
by BBC Books in 2012.
Below: Lance Parkin

About Time, a series of books

and Lars Pearson’s
A History aims to
the 1998 Comic Relief pastiche The Curse of chronicle every TV,

published since 2004, has gone into an

book, comic strip and
Fatal Death. As well as covering all of human
audio story from the
history, A History also includes sections on Doctor Who universe.

impressively obsessive level of detail.

Other books have concentrated on Dalek
history (The Official Doctor Who and the Daleks
Book by John Peel and Terry Nation, 1989;
The Ultimate Dalek Survival Guide by Justin
Richards, 2002) and updated chronologies
of Earth (A History of Humankind: The Doctor’s
Official Guide, 2016), Gallifrey (A Brief History
of Time Lords by Steve Tribe, 2017), and even
alien cultures (Myths and Legends: Epic Tales
from Alien Worlds by Richard Dinnick, 2017).
However, the weightiest and most
comprehensive books have expanded outwards
to cover the whole history of time and space.
The Whoniverse: The Untold History of Space and
Time by George Mann and Justin Richards
(2016) is illustrated with maps and images of
various worlds and monsters the Doctor has
encountered – from the Weeping Angels and
the Racnoss to the planets Sontar and Mars.
A History of the Universe in 100 Objects, by
James Goss and Steve Tribe (2012), takes
a slightly different approach. Inspired by
the popular BBC Radio 4 series and book
A History of the World in 100 Objects, the book
picks 100 artefacts that help to illustrate the
story of the universe from its beginning to
its end. From the Urns of Krop Tor, which
contained the terrifying demonic Beast
(The Satan Pit, 2006), to the Toclafane spheres
from the very end of the universe (Last of
the Time Lords, 2007) – via oddities such as
a cup of cocoa (The Aztecs, 1964), the sword
Excalibur (Battlefield, 1989) and Starship UK
(The Beast Below, 2010) – this is a book that
delights in small details.
The most comprehensive of all these
unofficial chronicles is Lance Parkin and
Lars Pearson’s A History. Covering not only
the Doctor’s TV adventures, but also books,
comic strips and audio stories – plus The
Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood – A History
sets itself the task of tying together all of the
Doctor’s adventures in one single timeline.
It has become an ongoing endeavour – the
first iteration was published in 1996 as
A History of the Universe, while the latest version
covers everything up to The Time of the Doctor
(2013). A supplementary book, UnHistory
(2017), covers those stories which take place
outside the series’ accepted ‘canon’ – such
as the 1960s movies Dr Who and the Daleks
and Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., and
the history of the Daleks and Gallifrey. Bottom left: The
It’s likely that, even while Gerry Davis Brigadier and the Third
was writing his ‘Creation of the Cybermen’ Doctor (Jon Pertwee)
back in 1974, he knew his efforts to create in Terror of the Autons
a consistent history of his machine creatures (1971).
were doomed to failure. After all, in this Bottom right: Sarah
Jane Smith (Elisabeth
prologue he claims the Cybermen had only
Sladen) in Pyramids of
visited the Earth once before their 2070 Mars (1975).
incursion – even though The Invasion (1968),
Silver Nemesis (1988) and The Next
Doctor (2008), among others, have
rendered his history obsolete.
There’s something wonderfully
futile about trying to pin down
the Doctor’s timeline, when you
know that just one sentence in
a story yet to be written could
change everything. No wonder
an exasperated Gerry Davis
exclaimed, “I loathe and detest
people who produce these
elaborate histories.”
As Lance Parkin’s A History
recognises, writing the history
of the Doctor is like painting
the Forth Bridge. By the time
you’ve finished, you need to
start again. And we wouldn’t
have it any other way. DWM

UNIT DATING: the solution Time, pointing out that the ‘near
future’ technology of the 1970s
UNIT stories is still in the realms

T
he UNIT puzzle has taxed
the imaginations of many
Doctor Who historians. In The
Terrestrial Index, Jean-Marc Lofficier
ignores the on-screen evidence and boldly
asserts that The Invasion was set in 1970,
and the Third Doctor’s adventures were
set one year after they were broadcast –
so 1971’s Terror of the Autons is said to
have been set in 1972 and so on.
While nodding to the production
team’s ‘near future’ intent, this isn’t
entirely convincing; for example, Sarah
Jane is hardly likely to forget when she
is from. The Discontinuity Guide goes
even further, saying the UNIT stories
are set in the year they were broadcast
– and Sarah Jane is talking rubbish.
Tat Wood also endorses this in About
of science-fiction today.
A History of the Universe in 100
Objects hedges its bets by going
for a vague ‘1970s’ for its UNIT-era
artefacts – giant maggots, Metebelis
crystals and so forth. Likewise,
Lance Parkin, while agonising over
the contradictory evidence, eventually
concludes that the UNIT stories took
place in ‘the Seventies, give or take
a year’ but doesn’t get any more
specific than that.
Perhaps that’s fair enough.
When even the Tenth Doctor can’t
remember if he worked for UNIT
“back in the Seventies – or was
it the Eighties?” (in the 2008
story The Sontaran Stratagem),
who are we to argue?

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 61 . .

 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW

THE
PUBLISHER’S
TALE BBC Books’ Albert DePetrillo explains how
Doctor Who’s range of official non-fiction
continues to evolve.
INTERVIEW BY MARK WRIGHT

62 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
A
s an imprint of Ebury
Publishing, BBC Books has
a remit to publish a wide
range of titles tying in to
BBC programmes. The
company’s list includes
numerous books related to
a much-loved television institution that has
been on our screens for six decades.
“I’ve always felt like Doctor Who is its own
beast,” explains Albert DePetrillo, publishing
director of BBC Books. “Like any brand,
it’s going to have peaks and troughs, but
it’s always been a consistent part of what
we do and there’s always been a dedicated
readership. That’s something we’re grateful
for and take very seriously.” to have a deep knowledge of the show to go,
Historically speaking, BBC Books has ‘Oh, I see what they’re trying to do there.’ Above: The
Whoniverse, by George
published official Doctor Who books since And, hopefully: ‘I know somebody who’s Mann and Justin
1996, the year of the Paul McGann TV a big fan who would like this.’” Richards, was one
Movie, its titles covering both fiction and BBC Books’ Doctor Who reference works are of the most in-depth
non-fiction. In its modern incarnation try to do one book that catches all those predominantly geared towards ‘in-universe’, Doctor Who books
– Ebury Publishing became a majority different types of fans, you’re bound to miss chronicling the fiction of the Doctor Who published in 2016.
shareholder in 2006 – BBC Books continues all of them. universe rather than the behind-the-scenes Below left: The
to publish a wide range of non-fiction “Across a particular year, we’ll do one book production reality. “In some ways, the fiction Doctor: His Lives and
Times (2013) by James
Doctor Who books in a constantly changing that is very intense and detailed for the fan side of our list is a bit more straightforward,” Goss and Steve Tribe
publishing world. who would expect that amount of depth. Albert points out, “because what you’re was aimed at the more
“One of the ways that Doctor Who perhaps Something like the The Vault [2013’s 50th trying to do there is expand the fictional casual fan.
bucks the trend is that you can publish all anniversary coffee-table book], Whoniverse universe with what additional stories we can Below centre: The
year round,” says Albert. “There’s a good [2016], or this year’s upcoming Dalek fall tell. That’s not to say it isn’t a huge challenge, Scientific Secrets of
amount of focus on what you’re going to squarely into that bracket. We’ll approach it’s just approached in a different way. Doctor Who (2015),
publish while the show is on air, because you that kind of book in a very different way, With non-fiction, it feels like, rather than by Simon Guerrier and
Dr Marek Kukula, was a
get more attention for what’s published when both editorially and design wise, to position expanding the universe, we’re explaining it
blend of fact and fiction.
it’s on. But there’s such love for the show it. And we do something for the more casual and getting people to relate to it.”
Below right: “What
that it gives you the opportunity to publish fan. So, books like The Doctor: His Lives and And what about books like The Scientific
a fantastic, creative
outside that TV window more confidently Times [2013], Whographica [2016], or for 2017 Secrets of Doctor Who (2015), by Simon playground to be part
that you would otherwise.” that would be The Book of Whoniversal Records Guerrier and Dr Marek Kukula, a popular of,” says BBC Books’
Over the last few years, BBC Books has [due for release in September]. There’s science book featuring short stories from Albert DePetrillo.
published lavish coffee-table reference quite a lot of wonderful detail in it, but it’s well-known Doctor Who fiction writers?
books, cookbooks, miscellanies, infographic an immediately recognisable concept. It’s “It was a great example of that blend
collections and popular science books, among something where you don’t necessarily have of fact and fiction,” says Albert.
others. We’ll talk about specific titles later,
but what does Albert look for in a pitch for
a non-fiction Doctor Who book? “What I’m “What I’m looking for first
is: is it something that’s
looking for first is: is it something that’s
surprising? Because of the rich history,
and because there’s always this challenge
to be new and fresh and innovative, is it
something that’s going to make me take surprising? The biggest
notice? There’s no prescription for what’s
going to make me do that, or what I think consideration for me is:
does it feel new?”
the fans will do when they hear about it.
It could be a terrific title, or it could be
a really interesting new spin on
something that’s been done before.
But the biggest consideration for me
is: does it feel new?
“Very few brands support the
breadth of output that Doctor Who
can support,” he continues. “It’s
a wonderful symptom of the infinite
possibilities of the Doctor Who
universe. What a fantastic, creative
playground to be part of. You can do
anything in Doctor Who, and that’s
reflected in our publishing; it tends to
be those fantastical brands, like Star
Wars, Harry Potter and Doctor Who in
which you see that kind of range.”
Presumably Doctor Who’s
wide-ranging fan base, from casual
to hardcore, provides a challenge
in itself ? “You’re absolutely right,”
Albert replies, “and one of the
things I’ve learned is that if you

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 63 . .

 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW Albert DePetrillo
“There’s the non-fiction of
Right: Three books
from Albert’s list:
the making of the show and
Who-ology by Cavan then there’s the non-fiction of
Scott and Mark Wright the world outside the show,
(2013), A Brief History the science that you can play a
of Time Lords by Steve bit with. I think what we ended
Tribe (2017) and The
up with was something in
Doctor Who Cookbook
by Joanna Farrow between what Simon and Marek
(2017). wanted to do, more on the
Below left and model of other popular science
inset: The range has books. Usually the approach is:
diversified with the here’s how the science of the show
2017 publication Paper works, and here’s the real science
Dolls, a collaboration
behind it. But we knew that that
between writer Simon
Guerrier, illustrator Ben wasn’t quite going to work for
Morris and cosplayer Doctor Who, because there is no real
Christel Dee. science behind the show! Once you
start to dig down, you’re like, what?!
“Paper Dolls sums up a relatively
Below right:
The endpapers from So it was more about how science advances
The Vault (2013), storytelling in Doctor Who.”

recent part of publishing that

Marcus Hearn’s lavish While straight, behind-the-scenes reference
coffee-table book
celebrating Doctor
books haven’t formed a major part of BBC

we’ve seen grow in the last few

Who’s 50th anniversary. Books’ output in recent years, Doctor Who’s
50th anniversary was marked by a lavish
hardback, Marcus Hearn’s The Vault. “Marcus
was brilliant,” recalls Albert. “And it was a lot
to pull together because we’d never done
a book quite like that, and it was being
done for the 50th anniversary, so
there was a lot of expectation. The
thing that helped was that Marcus
had a really simple, clear vision,
a year-by-year approach. He
wanted each year to have a little
synopsis, to give you the
overview, but then each year
was a different theme,
a different strand of the Doctor
Who story. There’s a loose
chronology to it, but it’s
actually a much richer book.
“It’s interesting, you get all
the big stuff done, and then
little details fall in towards
years, the cosplay fans.”
An Unearthly Child that formed The Vault’s a cool title.
endpapers. That came in at the very last There have
minute; it was the loveliest finishing touch.” been times when
The anniversary was also celebrated with I’ll approach a writer
a book I co-wrote with Cavan Scott. Albert and go, ‘I’ve got this
feels that the official miscellany Who-Ology great title, what’s
epitomises the ethos of BBC Books’ Doctor this book going to
Who output. “The audience we publish be?’ If you have a strong
for is 13-plus, and so we don’t publish for title, that can be the best first step towards
children, but everything we publish should getting people excited about it. I also think
be something that, if a child discovers it, the very first Brilliant Book of Doctor Who we
they will get something from. But, just as did was great. It was one of those books when
importantly, it taps into your inner child. you’re trying to really make a statement and
Who-Ology had exactly that wonderful break new ground.”
nostalgic pull that we hope we’re reaching.” New ground broken in recent years has
seen the growth of Doctor Who in the United

the end. In retrospect, they’re
just wonderful, but they
weren’t necessarily what
you planned for. I love the
studio floor plans from
W
hat other titles from the list stand
out for Albert? “This year I loved
A Brief History of Time Lords by
Steve Tribe. That’s a great example of a book
that comes along because you come up with
States, bringing with it a whole new audience.
It’s given Albert and his team an opportunity
to publish a different kind of non-fiction
book – August’s Paper Dolls, a collaboration
between Simon Guerrier, illustrator Ben

64 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
Morris and Doctor Who: The Fan Show
presenter Christel Dee. “Paper Dolls sums up
a relatively recent part of publishing in the
Doctor Who market that we’ve seen grow in
the last few years, the cosplay fans. It’s closely
connected to the US and what happens when
a whole new audience comes fresh to this
wonderful show. It’s fascinating to see how
they’re responding to the show itself and how
they’re coming to the books. So you have
things like the Doctor Who Cookbook, that was
done almost with the US in mind. There’s
a playfulness to it, and it’s been great to
explore that aspect of the show.
“That’s the other wonderful thing about
Doctor Who,” Albert continues, looking ahead
to the impending arrival of a new Doctor.
“Each regeneration is a chance to introduce
the basic concepts and the grammar of Doctor
Who to a whole new audience. And so with
the new Doctor it’s a chance to introduce
new companions, new enemies, maybe a new
take on the TARDIS; that gives a boost to our
publishing list.”
For Albert and his team, an awareness of
the much-loved non-fiction books that have
gone before remains an important aspect of
their work. “We try to always bear in mind
that every one of our titles is contributing to
a legacy and it should be approached in that
way. A great deal of thought and planning and
careful attention to detail goes into what we
do, because, for somebody, it’s going to
be that next Terrance Dicks/Malcolm
Hulke book, and that’s what we
have to plan it to be.
“It’s always a mountain
to climb every year,” Albert
concludes, looking back over
nearly a decade of overseeing BBC
Books’ Doctor Who list. “I’m always
amazed when we’ve finished another year
and we’ve managed to come up with
a fascinating array of different approaches
to the Doctor Who universe, and they all
have a wonderful distinct look to them.
It’s something we’re all very proud of and
really enjoy.” DWM

TOP TALE despair that you can feel as

a writer, and then there’s that
white-hot energy that comes just

F
or Albert DePetrillo,
there’s one non-fiction
book released during
his time at BBC Books that still
stands out – Russell T Davies and
Benjamin Cook’s The Writer’s Tale.
Released in September 2008, the
book took the form of Benjamin’s
email correspondence with Doctor
Who’s then showrunner.
“It’s a unique piece of work,”
says Albert. “Hand on heart, it’s
still my favourite Doctor Who
book that I’ve ever worked on. It’s
a brilliant look behind the scenes
of a big hit show. It has huge
insight into the writing process,
and it’s such a great example
of what a genius Russell is – that
reading his emails could be so
unbelievably fascinating. It’s not
a short book. We’d
talked about it being
maybe 90,000 words
of text. He delivered
over 200,000 words
of emails between
him and Ben. I’ve
never read 200,000
words faster.
“It’s just the
paciest read and it’s
almost diabolical how
good it is. He tells you
quite movingly the
fear and anxiety and
when you need it. It’s a book that
you want to get out into the world
and share with people.”
Above: The cover and
extracts from Paper
Dolls, the book that
takes Albert’s non-
fiction list in a new
direction.
Left: Albert’s favourite
non-fiction book is
Russell T Davies and
Benjamin Cook’s The
Writer’s Tale, which
was first published in
September 2008.

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 65 . .

THE INDIE SCENE
The advent of digital printing technology has transformed the world of short run,
niche publishing. This quiet revolution has left Doctor Who fans spoilt for choice…
T
he desire to catalogue,
critique, examine
and explain Doctor Who
has been the motive
force of fandom since
its infancy. Back then
it was fanzines that were the go-to place
for a forensic examination of bourgeois
liberalism in the Pertwee era or a 1,000-
word analysis on the merits of Season 18.
But not many people make fanzines
anymore, and for the cost of a well-
produced fan mag you can now make
yourself a kosher book – with a spine and
everything. So welcome to the world of
the independent Doctor Who publisher.
This is where titles too esoteric, too
strange or too subversive for the likes of
BBC Books, Panini and Titan live.
For too long, the only Doctor Who life
stories out there were either by or about
the big hitters – William Hartnell, Jon
Pertwee, Tom Baker. Marquee names that
booksellers could trust to shift units. The
idea of a Kit Pedler or John Nathan-Turner
biography one day being marketable would
have sounded preposterous 20 years ago.
But here we are, living in a time when we
can devour the memoirs of Bob Baker
and Robert Banks Stewart or buy tomes
dedicated to Verity Lambert, Robert Holmes
and Matthew Waterhouse.
Although Miwk was initially set up to
publish the gloriously irreverent Blake’s 7
guide Maximum Power, it was with its
headline-grabbing biography, JN-T: The
Life & Scandalous Times of John Nathan-
Turner, that it made its name. Talking of
names, Miwk itself “comes from when Rob
Hammond and I were recording the ‘Oh
Mummy’ soundtrack for the Pyramids of Mars
DVD,” says co-founder Matt West. “He got to
FEATURE BY STEVE O’BRIEN
“A typical Fantom reader is a Above left: Published
by Miwk in 2016, Stuart
media-literate, intelligent person
Manning’s The Worzel
Book examines the
popular children’s
who has an interest in cult series Worzel
Gummidge, which
starred Jon Pertwee
television history.” Dexter O’Neill and Una Stubbs.
Above centre: In 2016
Telos published Stephen
this word ‘milk’ and for some reason it just range. Worzel Gummidge, The Tomorrow People, James Walker’s Time
made us laugh.” Robin of Sherwood and even All Creatures Great of the Doctor – an
unofficial guide to the
Although the Nathan-Turner book and Small have dedicated soft covers. Other
2013 series.
garnered a great deal of publicity, it was books include the tour diaries of Marillion
Above right:
never likely to be a title with much appeal frontman Steve Hogarth. But Doctor Who
Greatest Show in the
beyond the Doctor Who hardcore. But Matt remains the backbone of the business. Galaxy star Jessica
was convinced there was enough of an “When we do crossover it’s wonderful,” Martin at a signing
audience out there to justify putting some says Matt. “We were at The Hooded Man, of her graphic novel
dosh behind it. a Robin of Sherwood event in Chepstow. We Elsie Harris Picture
Although both West and Hammond are were pushing Hooded Man, the book. But one Palace, published by
Miwk in 2015.
long-time Doctor Who fans, the series isn’t guy was just goldfishing at the table. He was Photo © Keith Barnfather.
the only focus of their ever-growing book a Marillion fan, grew up on The Tomorrow
Far left: Michael
People, was an ophthalmologist and was Seely’s biography of
aware of Kit Pedler, and here he is at a Doctor Who director
hotel in Chepstow with seven new books Douglas Camfield
in his arms.” was published by
Although West insists there’s no Miwk in 2017.
indie publishing rivalry (“I get on Left: In 2013 Telos
great with David Howe at Telos, Stuart published this updated
edition of Richard
Douglas at Obverse and Dexter O’Neill Molesworth’s book
at Fantom – I’m not sure any of us feels Wiped!: Doctor Who’s
we’re in competition with each other”), Missing Episodes.
Miwk’s range shares a lot of ground
with Fantom, which publishes a similar
medley of Who-related biographies and
cult TV guides.
“A typical Fantom reader is a media-
literate, intelligent person who has
an interest in entertainment and cult
television history,” says founder Dexter
O’Neill. Beginning as a film company,
Fantom soon diversified into books,
audiobooks and conventions. And with all
that, it’s still only Dexter and his colleague
Paul Ballard who work full-time.
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 67 . .
 THE INDIE SCENE

MARATHON MAN
Alongside Robert Shearman, Toby
Hadoke has embarked on a mission to
watch every Doctor Who episode for
Running Through Corridors, a series
of books published by Lars Pearson’s
Mad Norwegian Press. “It’s all quite
jolly,” says Toby. “We never really
meet Lars, which is sad because when
you meet publishers they’re supposed
to buy you a glass of wine and flatter
you. Instead we just get emails gently
asking us where the hell the latest edit
is. I mean, they’re very nice and polite
emails but you can’t drink them.
“The first book was Rob
Shearman’s idea,” he continues. “A
positive Doctor Who odyssey in the
form of a conversation between two
mates, to give it a bit of sparkle.
Nobody tells us what to write – the
book goes through an edit but it’s
collaborative. Lars is a very nice fellow
but he can be quite ruthless with my
contrived jokes, and I think that’s fair
enough. Reading some entries back,
I think occasionally he should have
been more ruthless!”
What’s the appeal of working for
independent publishers as opposed
to writing something that’s been
licensed? “Well, I run an independent
comedy club so I’m all for the
little guy. Also, passion projects
so often have much more time
spent on perfecting them than stuff
produced by big companies. With a
publisher like Lars you know he’s
not taking the money and running
because the margins are so small. He
does it for the love. And I think that’s
reflected in the end product.”
undertake projects that bigger publishers
wouldn’t touch.”
“We have our editorial control,” says
Dexter. “This means that if we love a
title, even if it might not be a commercially
rewarding endeavour, we can publish it
and be proud of what we’ve done.”
For Obverse, that freedom has allowed
it to do something even more niche.
Inspired by Bloomsbury’s 33⅓ series of
music books and the BFI’s range of movie
publications, the Black Archive range of
‘critical monographs’ goes deep into
individual Doctor Who stories, teasing
out subtexts and putting them into
a socio-cultural context. Currently
11 stories down (they’re not being
released in chronological order), the
series is planned to continue indefinitely.
“The main surprise,” says Stuart Douglas,
“is that, though Phil Purser-Haggard (who
came up with the idea of the books) and me
both thought there might be as many as 30
Doctor Who titles which could be discussed

Above right: The

first volume of Robert
Fantom has a far-reaching range of
biographies and autobiographies in its
catalogue, including books by or about
“You can dare to undertake
projects that bigger publishers
Shearman and Toby
Hadoke’s Running Deborah Watling, Anthony Ainley, Peter
Through Corridors Vaughan, Derrick Sherwin and Jacqueline
was published by
Mad Norwegian
Press in 2010.
Pearce. But Dexter’s favourite remains
A Constant Alien, the 2016 memoir by
City of Death and Space:1999 actress
wouldn’t touch.” Lars Pearson
Below: Tat Wood at that sort of length, we’ve had brilliant
Catherine Schell. books, an ongoing series by Tat Wood
continued the ambitious
About Time series with “The story of her life is far more which, according to Lars, aims to examine pitches for all sorts of stories which we
these two volumes, fascinating than any of the anecdotes about “the whole of Doctor Who through the lens were sure wouldn’t stand up to significant
published by Mad the programmes she’s worked on,” he of real-world social and political changes textual criticism.”
Norwegian Press. enthuses. “Quite often the famous ‘credit’ as well as ongoing developments in The Black Archive is a very recent addition
Below right: “You is what generates the interest in the title, television production.” to Obverse’s range of Doctor Who titles.
get to be much more but then the merits of the title surpass the The About Time series is as opinionated Initially set up by Stuart as a response
candid,” says New reader’s expectation.” as it is scholarly. “You get to be much more to BBC Books’ cancellation of its Eighth
York-based publisher
Lars Pearson.
Mad Norwegian Press, started in the early candid,” says Lars about working Doctor range of novels, the company’s first
noughties by New York-based Lars Pearson, on an unofficial basis. “You book was a collection of short stories
Opposite page above:
Inside and outside the
doesn’t go in for biographies, instead can wear whatever sense based around Paul Magrs’ character
Miwk shop in Reigate. offering “fine non-fiction SF analysis” as of humour you Iris Wildthyme. “Everything I’ve
Opposite page below: well a smattering of original fiction. like, and dare to published since,” says Stuart,
The Black Archive #11: The company’s “has been down to that.”
The Evil of the Daleks signature work has Indie publishers cover a
by Simon Guerrier probably been the bold wide range in terms of size
and Downtime by and brilliant About Time and ambition. Some have
Dylan Rees.
print runs of only a few
hundred, others go deep
into the thousands. Some,
like Mad Norwegian Press,
have a distributor that gets
their books into most of the
major US bookstores as well
as onto Amazon. Miwk even
opened its own shop a few
years ago, nestled among
the hair salons and estate

68 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .

agents of Reigate town centre, selling
not only its own books, but – in an
admirable spirit of fan solidarity –
ones by Fantom, Telos and Obverse.
But being ‘small press’, there often
isn’t the capital for big marketing
strategies or muscular advertising
campaigns. More often than not,
these publishers rely on word of
mouth or social media pushes, or
a review in one of the genre mags.
“I take on books where I know we have a
captive audience,” says Matt West. “When
you have that fan group, attentive and
hungry for fresh new material, the book,
if good enough, will sell itself. But you can’t
be cynical about it either; just whacking
Doctor Who on a book cover will not sell
it. We live in tough times, financially. Our
books aren’t cheap and so have to provide
value for money.”
Happily, Doctor Who and cult telly fandom
is such a voracious beast that none of
the publishers we spoke to appears to be
struggling. All have plenty of books in the
pipeline and they don’t seem short of pitches
for future projects.
“I never want to be in a situation where
we publish a book for the money,” says
Matt. “Being independent means we have
that freedom. We don’t have to attend a focus
group or gather market research to find
out if we ‘should’ publish a biography of
Douglas Camfield.”
Fewer and fewer of the mainstream
publishers will take a chance now on titles
without a built-in audience, and if you’re a
writer with a dream of going somewhere less
travelled with a book, then the indie quarter
is where it’s at.
“I can say ‘yes’ to a book and turn
someone’s lifetime obsession into a legitimate
published work,” says Matt. “Long after
the author and publisher are dead and
buried, those physical books will still be out
there somewhere, with all that information
documented for future generations. Whether
they want it or not!” DWM
PUBLISHERS’
FAVOURITES
The publishers choose their favourite books
from their own catalogues…
Stuart Douglas (Obverse):
“I was extremely chuffed when
I held Iris Wildthyme and the
Celestial Omnibus, the first Obverse
book, in my hands, but I was also
delighted to publish an original
novel by Paul Magrs (The Ninnies),
a brand-new novella by Michael
Moorcock (Curare) and to relaunch
the Faction Paradox and Sexton
Blake novel ranges.”
JR Southall (Watching Books):
“The title I probably feel most
proud of is You and Who Else, the
telefantasy volume. All the essays
are pretty amazing, but some of the
memories people have committed
to paper are heartbreaking.
And heartwarming!”
Tim Hirst (Hirst Books): “Michael
Troughton’s biography of his father
was long overdue and Pat’s story
really needed to be told. Matthew
Waterhouse’s memoirs were also
a real coup, and obviously I have a
soft spot for Anneke Wills’ books. My
personal favourite – as a fan – has
to be Auton: Shock & Awe. It was so
subversive and genuinely hilarious.”
Matt West (Miwk): “Wallowing in
Our Own Weltschmerz, which we
did for the Alzheimer’s Society. Also
Justyce Served, because I’d always
wanted to write about the [unofficial
Doctor Who audio productions] Audio
Visuals and thought it would sell in
modest numbers – but actually
it went through four reprints.”
Dexter O’Neill (Fantom):
“Catherine Schell’s autobiography
A Constant Alien.”
David J Howe (Telos): “Probably
The Target Book, which is a subject
I care a lot about. Being able to
design and publish a full-colour
hardback book on the subject
of the Target Doctor Who
novelisations was something
of a dream come true.”
Lars Pearson (Mad Norwegian
Press): “A History, which I wrote
with Lance Parkin. I keep saying that
A History is ‘bigger than War and
Peace’, which is absolutely true.
The fourth edition is approaching
950,000 words. Oh God, oh God...
it’s nearly a million words!”
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 69
. .
 THE

DWM

WRITERS’
INTERVIEW

TALES Written by Russell T Davies and long-time

Doctor Who Magazine contributor Benjamin Cook,
The Writer’s Tale is a unique chronicle of the series’
twenty-first century production.
INTERVIEW BY MARK WRIGHT

he 2008 memoir The Writer’s bigger. And then we just didn’t stop emailing. “I think it’s probably still the most grown-up

T
Above: The cover of
The Writer’s Tale: The Tale covers the highs and It became a daily thing that added up to non-fiction book with the official Doctor Who
Final Chapter (2010) lows of Russell T Davies’ a year-long interview, and after we finished logo on it,” says Ben. “All credit to BBC Books
featured David Tennant, hugely successful tenure the first book we kept going and got a second for publishing something as searingly honest,
Russell T Davies and as writer and executive book out of it.” raw and candid.”
John Simm.
producer of Doctor Who. When the original book was published, Despite the many dark moments in The
Below: The revived A lavish, fully illustrated readers familiar with Russell’s cheery public Writer’s Tale, there’s still a lot of humour in
Doctor Who’s original
executive producers
hardback containing photos, script extracts image were taken aback by his unflinching the book. “The plan was to cut a lot of gags
– Mal Young, Julie and Russell’s own drawings, the book was account of the show’s day-to-day challenges. and tangents,” Ben points out. “Then
Gardner and Russell based on a long email correspondence with

“All credit to BBC Books for

T Davies – pictured in journalist Benjamin Cook. As Ben explains,
August 2004. this correspondence wasn’t originally

publishing something as searingly

intended to be a book at all.
“It started life as a DWM article, back
when I didn’t quite appreciate how long
Russell’s emails are,” he says. “Very quickly it
became apparent that it had to be something honest, raw and candid.” Ben Cook
I realised it was almost impossible to unpick

KEEPING IT REAL “I think The Writer’s Tale is a proper

guide to writing,” he continues. “It’s
about writing under pressure, as in,
Russell T Davies talks to Stephen Kelly ‘You need to deliver this by 9.00 am
about The Writer’s Tale. on Monday and this is the budget, so
it doesn’t matter what other ideas you
these from the rest of the book. It did lighten
the mood occasionally, so we left all that in.”
The high profile of both Russell and the
series led to the book’s foreword being
written by bestselling fantasy author Philip
Pullman. “Russell’s name opens doors,” says

“I
don’t look at it at all,” says
Russell T Davies of The
Writer’s Tale. “It’s kind of
like opening a furnace. I can’t believe
how hard I worked. What people
forget is that the book leaves out
Torchwood and The Sarah Jane
Adventures, and I worked so hard
on those two shows as well. I was
there for every script, every edit, every
session... But never mind. You’ve got
to draw a line somewhere.”
How does Russell feel about the
book having been described as a
screenwriter’s bible? “I don’t know if
anyone holds it up,” he says modestly.
“There are books out there that
divide scripts into story arcs, the
A-plot, the B-plot, exciting incident,
the reveal and things like that. Even
though friends of mine have written
some of them, I despise these books
with all my heart. They’re the death of
art, and should be burned.
may have had.’ I hope I put one book
out there that dismissed all that other
rubbish and talked about how it really is.”
Ben. “You contact Philip Pullman and say
‘Would you write a foreword to this book?’,
and even people as esteemed as that will
say, ‘Yes, I’m a big fan of Russell T Davies.’
That’s why BBC Books jumped at the
chance to publish The Writer’s Tale. We were
able to get the book onto Richard & Judy
and all sorts of news shows, stuff that you
wouldn’t necessarily get if it was another
Doctor Who book.”
The original book also had an impact
on incoming showrunner Steven Moffat,
who was yet to assume his post when it was
published. “Steven’s been asked countless
times, ‘Are you going to do a similar book
to The Writer’s Tale?’ And he’s always said it
would just be the same book with a shorter,
angrier man! The first book was published
around the time he was writing his first series
and he said it was like moving into a haunted
mansion and finding the diary of the previous
owner. You know, this is what the job’s really

70 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
 Above: Chapter Eleven of The Writer’s Tale had
a provocative title.
Right: In 2005 Russell promoted his first series
of Doctor Who by cosying up to a Slitheen.

like. So I’m quite proud that I’ve co-written

the book that scared Steven Moffat!”
The success of The Writer’s Tale led to an
updated second edition, subtitled The Final
Chapter, published in spring 2010. Despite
featuring over 300 extra pages, some
compromises had to be made. “In order to fit
it all in, we had to cut the script element,”
says Ben. “It’s sort of half a sequel and half
a second edition. Some people like the
one with scripts and pictures,
and other people like the one
with more text. Buy both,
that’s my advice!”

W
ill this remain the
final cut of The
Writer’s Tale or is there
bonus material that could be
reinstated for future editions?
“I’d love to say there’s loads of
stuff I’m saving for the 10th or
20th anniversary edition, but
surprisingly little was cut,”
admits Ben. “There was
the identity of the actress
who was going to be cast
as [original Series Four
companion] Penny, whose
name I will take to my
grave. When the prospect
of Catherine Tate coming
back as Donna came
along, Penny became one
of those characters that
only ever existed as a maybe.
The book’s full of really
wonderful ideas that never
made it to the screen. A few
other things were cut for legal
reasons. They were too libellous!”
The Writer’s Tale remains
a groundbreaking, influential
work. “Obviously both our names are on the
cover,” says Ben. “But Russell made that book
what it is. It’s quite nice that even nine years
on I’m still receiving tweets and emails from
people in some way inspired by The Writer’s
Tale. That’s not particularly why we did it,
but it’s certainly rather lovely.” DWM

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 71

. .
GRAPHIC
In recent years, ‘infographics’
have brought a new dimension
to the presentation of information

DETAIL
and data about Doctor Who’s
rich and varied history.
FEATURE BY ROBERT FAIRCLOUGH
 I
nfographics – extracts
of information clearly
presented in accessible,
graphic forms such as
graphs and pie charts –
are a way of rationalising
the increasing amount of
data we’re bombarded with. Infographics
have become increasingly popular since
the digital revolution of the late twentieth
century and are now a part of everyday life,
to the point where they’ve become a major
component of journalism, commerce and
education. The proliferation of computer
games, as well as the growth of the internet
and social media, have also contributed to
the popularity of infographics.
One of their strengths is that they can
reveal patterns of information and statistics
that otherwise might not have been obvious.
For this reason, fans of long-running and/
or complex fictional subjects have embraced
them, producing designs that can range
from the seriously illuminating to the
unashamedly irreverent. Star Wars admirers
can now see how all the characters’ family
trees interrelate, Star Trek enthusiasts are able
to consider the many and varied hairstyles
of Lieutenant Uhuru, while Game of Thrones
fans can appreciate the tangled network of
sexual relations between the fantasy drama’s
characters (in diagram form).
With such a long, diverse and
comprehensively catalogued history, Doctor
Who is ideal for the infographic treatment.
In 2013, to coincide with the series’ 50th
anniversary, designer Paul Smith published
the unofficial Time & Space Visualiser through
his company Wonderful Books. “Data
visualisation struck me as something that
hadn’t been applied to the show that
much,” he says. “I have a background
in technical and business publishing
that has involved working with and
charting data, so I wanted to see
how many ways I could find to apply
the visualisation techniques I’d
learned to Doctor Who. I was inspired
by designer and data-journalist
David McCandless’ book Information
is Beautiful [2009], particularly by
its variety of content.”
Is Paul a dedicated Doctor Who fan?
“Certainly, and I have a head full of trivia
and knowledge! I started out making lists
of ideas, then refined them by trying to find
relationships. One set of data is basically just
a list of facts and presenting it graphically
adds little. But take two sets, see how they
relate to and ideally affect each other, then
you can start to consider ways to express
that relationship.”
Four years on, the book still looks BBC videos and DVDs and, staggeringly,
innovative. Highlights include the ‘All of the word counts for every Doctor Who Above left: Writer
Time and Space’ 1963-2012 series guides, novelisation – in order of publication. and graphic designer
Paul Smith.
which tabulate story titles, existing and Looking back on the project, Paul says,
missing episodes, viewing figures, production “I learned a lot about the variety of ways Above: Paul’s
innovative book Time
personnel, companions and principal there are to display information, but also that
& Space Visualiser was
members of the supporting cast, across simpler and clearer is generally better than published to coincide
eight appealing and cleanly constructed fancy for the sake of it. I did, however, end up with Doctor Who’s
pages. Another stand-out is ‘The Roof of the including a lot of text, because I sometimes 50th anniversary.
World’, a double-page spread which details lacked confidence in how well the graphics Inset: Paul was
the highest and lowest geographic points expressed the information, and I thought the inspired by the data
on Earth the Doctor has visited. In another niche audience would want to check my data. visualisation techniques
of David McCandless,
section, Paul gives full rein to his knowledge If I was doing the book now, I would make
author of the 2009
of Doctor Who minutiae the graphics stand alone. book Information is
by detailing the release “I think I’m right in saying that the Time Beautiful.
order of Target Books, & Space Visualiser was the first Doctor Who
“I wanted to see how many
ways I could find to apply the
visualisation techniques I’d
learned to Doctor Who.” Paul Smith
Far left: This spread
from Time & Space
Visualiser illustrates
the highest and lowest
Earth locations that the
Doctor has visited.
Left: Another page
from Paul’s book, with
information about
Target’s range of Doctor
Who novelisations.
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 73 . .
 GRAPHIC DETAIL

infographics book,” Paul adds proudly.
“Just four years ago, people were perhaps
less experienced with ‘reading’ data graphics
than they are now, since newspapers and
Above left: broadcasters, in particular, have really
Whographica (2016) ramped up their data graphics output. Some
was researched and of the feedback on the book was tempered
written by Steve O’Brien
and Simon Guerrier.
with the suggestion that it was ‘really nerdy
stuff ’, but I hope it helped to show that
Above right:
Whographica pages
even nitty-gritty, ‘nerdy’ knowledge can be
featuring Ben Morris’ expressed in a clear, visual way.”
form and they turned it down,” Steve
explains. “The original idea was to present
it as an episode guide with a review and an
infographic for each story. They weren’t so
keen on that, but got back in touch a few
months later and asked me to re-pitch it in
a different form.”
Whographica was duly restructured as a book
of infographics running over 12 themed
chapters. Some of the most
successful examples are the
‘Vital Statistics’ features for
each Doctor, which reveal
everything from the amount
of times the Third Doctor
indulged in Venusian Aikido
with, among other entertaining features,
a chart showing ‘Everyone We’ve Ever Seen
Inside the TARDIS’ – which takes up several
pages – and ‘Poop Poop!’, a guide to the
26 vehicles the Third Doctor drove, rode,
flew or piloted.
“Albert DePetrillo, publishing director
at BBC Books, had commissioned me to
illustrate three books
prior to Whographica,”
Ben Morris reveals. “He’d
also seen the Doctor Who
and Eurovision character
icons I’d drawn in the
past, and thought the
style of those indicated

I
illustrations.
Inset: The cover of n 2016, BBC Books ventured onto the to the aspects of the Twelfth’s I’d be a good fit for
Tim Leong’s Super ground broken by the Time & Space character which come from a book on infographics.
Graphic (2013). Visualiser with a lavish and colourful book his predecessors – Rudeness Albert had been
Below left: More entitled Whographica. Extensively illustrated (First), Alienness (Fourth) inspired by a book
of Ben’s impressive by Ben Morris, the book was researched and and Scottishness (Seventh). called Super Graphic
diagrams from written by Steve O’Brien and Simon Guerrier. The book is more playful than [2011] about the
Whographica.
“I pitched it to the BBC in a very different Smith’s Time & Space Visualiser, superhero universe.”

74 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .

“It looks stunning and gives fans
some old information in a minty
fresh way, and new information
in an unusual way.” Steve O’Brien
How did the production process work?
“Steve and Simon had done some of the
groundwork,” Ben explains, “working out
roughly the thrust of the chapters, and had
started on their copious amounts of research.
Then we batted ideas back and forth. I know
Steve and Simon spent many a long day and
night ploughing through all the episodes,
though the three of us didn’t actually meet up
until the book was launched at Comic Con in
late 2016.”
T
he book was the most challenging and
intensive project Morris has attempted.
“I’d done the odd infographic for
a book called Who-ology [2013], with varying
degrees of success. But really my experience
drawing infographics was virtually zero, so
I had to read up a lot about the different
types there are, for example treemaps [data
displayed in a rectangular graph, sub-divided
into different categories], and also watch
dozens of tutorials on how to create some
of the more complicated ones.”
Another successful aspect of Whographica is
its element of graphic wit. Notable examples
include the tangled timeline of the Doctor’s
scarf for the history of the story Shada, and
a Dalek offering Davros a bunch of flowers to
apologise for exterminating him. “That was
important to stop the book becoming dry,”
says Ben, laughing. “I’d seen one or two other
infographics books which were brilliantly
designed, but slightly impenetrable due to
their lack of humour.”
Ben hopes that the colourful illustrations
in Whographica are appealing to children as
well as older fans. “If you’re a young fan who
likes to absorb facts anyway, I think this book
is a goldmine. I wanted each spread to look
quite different from the one it follows, with
very bright colours and bold typography so
that it would not only appeal to young fans,
but also people who are perhaps only casual
fans, or not even fans at all.”
WALL
CHARTS
D
octor Who infographics are
currently some of the most common
TV series-based examples of the
form. Stand-out examples include the posters
produced for the company CableTV.com and
those by artist Bob Canada.
CableTV.com’s timeline of Doctor Who
(‘1963-2011’) was, at the time, a near-definitive
take on this often-attempted infographic
concept. Every Doctor (up to the Eleventh),
companion and ‘major foe’ was exhaustively
documented on a large poster in a mix of
primary colours, photographs and flow charts.
An informative pie chart listed the gender
balance of companions up to 2011 – 34
females, 14 males, one android, one robot dog
and ‘1 gender neutral Sontaran.’
Bob Canada’s unofficial infographic posters
– ‘Doctor Who Enemies 1960s-1970s’ and
another showing all the Doctors up to the
Eleventh – are defined by amusing caricatures
of various monsters and Doctors, with the Ninth
being especially well realised.
Steve O’Brien has nothing but praise
for Ben Morris’ contribution. “He did such
a great job in realising mine and Simon’s
ideas. The book is bursting with imagination.
I think it looks stunning and gives fans some
old information in a minty fresh way, and Top left:
new information in an unusual way.” Whographica’s map
“I’d love to do another book,” says Ben illustrating the record-
enthusiastically. “One thing I learnt was that breaking transmission
you have to be sanguine when the inevitable, of The Day of the
Doctor (2013).
odd mistake slips through. I’m extremely proud
of Whographica. It’s the biggest project I’ve Far left: Whographica
co-author Steve
undertaken, and to hear people say how much O’Brien sneaks aboard
they’ve enjoyed the book is very satisfying.” the TARDIS.
Paul Smith is equally positive – with Above: The CableTV.
reservations – about revisiting the world com ‘Timeline of
of Doctor Who infographics. “Time & Space Doctor Who’ runs from
Visualiser was great fun to produce, and 1963 to 2011.
I was pleased to be ahead of the curve with Left: Bob Canada’s
such a book. I do sometimes think about unofficial infographic
doing a follow-up, with added information posters of the Doctors
and ‘Doctor Who
from the last few series. But then I think Enemies 1960s-1970s’.
about the amount of work involved and
break out in a cold sweat!” DWM
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 75 . .
 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW

THE
BOOKKEEPER
Doctor Who’s account brand manager Edward Russell is
the ultimate authority on what goes into a reference book.
INTERVIEW BY SIMON GUERRIER

76 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
 dward Russell joined the BBC
E
in 2000 to oversee the Top of
the Pops website. As part of
the online team, he also
worked on sites for other
BBC programmes, including
Doctor Who.
“That was as Doctor Who came back on
TV in 2005,” he explains. “I absolutely loved
what [showrunner] Russell T Davies did
in bringing it back. It was what I’d always
wanted Doctor Who to be – no, better! Then
an opportunity came up to work for a year
with the brand team on the series in Cardiff.
I started in January 2006 and have been here
ever since.”
Today, Edward is in charge of the brand
team – but what does that mean? “My job
covers everything. I look after how the TV
programme is packaged and presented.
Then things sit alongside that: if there’s a
Doctor Who competition on Blue Peter or a
sketch for Children in Need. And then there’s
commercial stuff: the toys, licensed products
and publishing. It all comes to me.”
So when people producing books – or toys
or tea towels or audio plays – speak of getting
approval from ‘Cardiff ’, they mean Edward?
“I guess so,” he laughs. “I give approval on
behalf of the executive producers of the show.
I mean, they’re across this stuff generally but
they don’t need to see every single t-shirt or
trading card.”
“My job covers everything. I look
after how the TV programme is
packaged and presented.”
How does it work with books? “We have
two publishers: Ebury for adult books and
Penguin for the children’s, though they’re
both part of one company. They come
straight to me with their ideas for what they
want to do. With this kind of thing, you
have to listen to these people who know the
market. But I know Doctor Who better than
they do – especially what’s coming up in the
series – so we work together to mould the
best possible Doctor Who publications.”
To understand Edward’s role in shaping
a book, I look through my own emails from
2014, when pitching what
became The Scientific Secrets
of Doctor Who. My original
idea was to include short
interviews with the series’
cast and crew. For example,
we would ask Peter Capaldi
how he learns the often very
technical dialogue given to
the Doctor and from there
explore the mechanics of
memory. ‘Cardiff ’ – that
is, Edward – vetoed that
idea. Why?
He laughs. “The cast and
crew are busy making the
series and we try to limit extra
burdens like interviews. But
there was also the particular
issue of science. I mean, there
are lots of good scientific
ideas in the show – take the Edward cites The Doctor Who Monster Book
effects of the black hole in World Enough and (1975), the Target novelisations of TV stories Opposite page:
Edward Russell, Doctor
Time (2017). [Writer] Steven Moffat talked and early issues of Doctor Who Weekly (now Who’s account brand
that through with his son, who is studying Doctor Who Magazine) as reference works manager since 2006,
physics, and Peter Capaldi is brilliant in he savoured as a child. “They had the magic with the Twelfth Doctor,
the scene where the Doctor explains it. and excitement of the series, and there was Peter Capaldi.
Photo © Jon Pountney.
But it wouldn’t be fair to expect him to a sense of them sharing special access.
answer questions on the physics of it for a It’s that feeling I look for in what comes Above: Edward was
book. And it’s a better book for being your across my desk.” disappointed by the
Doctor Who Discovers
interpretation, rather than some kind of So is there a Doctor Who reference book books published in
definitive statement from people making Edward would like to see published? “Yes,” the 1970s.
the programme.” he says. “Every time a new companion is Below right: Astrid
announced, I get a call from the BBC press
(Kylie Minogue) in the
office or somewhere asking, ‘How many 2007 Christmas Special
companions have there been?’ They expect Voyage of the Damned.
a simple answer, a number. But do you Below left: The
include Astrid Peth (from 2007’s Voyage of the ominous black hole
Damned)? If you count people who travelled from World Enough
in the TARDIS and for more than one story,
someone gets left out. But you could give a
and Time (2017).
number if you also explain your reasoning.
Another concern was that a science book So I’d like a book that does that. Then
should match the tone of the series. “There the press office can say, ‘According to
have been people,” sighs Edward, “who The Pedants’ Guide to Doctor Who...’”
wanted to produce educational books and He laughs. “I should write it.” DWM
thought that if they just put the Doctor Who
logo on the front then kids would read them.
But I remember being so disappointed by the
Doctor Who Discovers books from the 1970s,
which felt like a lecture. Storytelling and
adventure is at the heart of Doctor Who and
have to come first. If people learn things, too,
that’s obviously a massive bonus – but it must
be that way round.”
REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 77 . .
 Historical
Accuracy
Doctor Who: The Complete History is arguably the most ambitious
reference work ever compiled about this, or any other, television series.
FEATURE BY EMILY COOK

P
ublished by Panini in alongside John Ainsworth, who was that to produce each issue. At any one
Below left: John
collaboration with initially approached to be the sole editor moment, there are six books at various
Ainsworth (above) and
Mark Wright are joint Hachette Partworks, of a partwork which would be based on stages of production.” Thirteen volumes
editors of the partwork Doctor Who: The Andrew Pixley’s Doctor Who Magazine into the partwork, it became clear that
Doctor Who: The Complete History is Archive features. “Andrew’s DWM Archives this mammoth project would require more
Complete History. a comprehensive Doctor were published over a very long period of than one editor. That’s when Mark came
Below right: Andrew Who partwork that time,” John points out. “There was no real on board.
Pixley’s Archives launched in September 2015 and is released consistency in the way they were presented, “There’s a lot of plate-spinning that goes
from Doctor Who
fortnightly as a series of lavish hardback so there was a lot of interest in the idea of on with any partwork, and The Complete
Magazine issues 209
and 227, featuring The books. The Complete History claims to be ‘The republishing and updating the Archives in History is no exception,” says Mark. “John
Underwater Menace definitive guide to the making of Doctor Who’. some form, and this ultimately led to the edits the even-numbered issues and I do the
(1967) and Snakedance “There are so many wonderful books decision to turn them into a partwork. odd-numbered ones. Right now I have one
(1983).These features devoted to the history of Doctor Who, but “The challenge of editing a partwork book I’m editing the raw text for, one book
are updated and a partwork has the beauty of building up publication comes right at the very being proofed, one book that’s about to go
expanded for The
Complete History.
across many volumes, so there can be a more beginning. The whole series of books has to to design, and a fourth book that will go to
detail,” says co-editor Mark Wright. “And be carefully planned out, deciding exactly press in a couple of days.
not to put too fine a point on it, as Doctor what will go in each book, and how many “One of the most time-consuming jobs
Who fans we are collectors. We like having pages each book will be. It’s initially a lot of from an editing point of view is to prepare
things that line up and work, but if it’s done well and you’ve devised the raw text taken from Andrew Pixley’s
look pretty on the shelf – a realistic production schedule, then the DWM Archive features. It’s mine and John’s
and that can be pulled out day-to-day work becomes easier. job to edit that into the partwork format
and read again and again.” “A new issue of The Complete History is sent and generally tidy it up. This then goes
Mark co-edits to print every two weeks,” John continues, to Andrew for a thorough going over and
The Complete History “but of course it takes much longer than updating with information that’s come
to light since the original Archives were

“The challenge of editing written. This is an essential part of the

process, and having Andrew involved is

a partwork comes right at

incredibly important.
“In the meantime, each story has a brand-
new introduction, synopsis section, profile

the beginning. The whole and merchandise section compiled by

various writers. Then, once the text comes

series has to be carefully

back from Andrew, there’s generally some
more tweaking before it’s styled up and
goes through to the design stage with our

planned out.” John Ainsworth designer Paul Vyse. It’s Paul’s job to flow
everything in and source photographs from

78 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
 Above: Lee Johnson
creates montages for
every story covered in
The Complete History.
This is his artwork for
Mummy on the Orient
Express (2014), which
featured in issue 55.

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 79 . .

 Historical Accuracy
the DWM picture archive. He’s a magician
Right: The introduction
to Marco Polo (1964),
at making a lot of very detailed text fit into
from issue 32 of The the page count and make it look visually
Complete History. striking. Once Paul has worked his magic, it
Below left: Lee then goes through the subbing and proofing
Johnson’s cover process, with fact-checking as far as possible.”
illustrations for issues Tasked with sub-editing, proofing and
23 and 75 featured the fact-checking are myself, Emily Cook, and
Fourth Doctor (Tom
Panini’s Nic Hubbard. “I double-check
Baker) and Eleventh
Doctor (Matt Smith) every single fact, from the origins of Tegan’s
respectively. last name to the ins-and-outs of a Fourier
Below right: Lee’s analysis,” says Nic, “as well as correcting
montage for 1967’s spelling and grammar, and generally
The Evil of the Daleks making sure that our cross-referencing is
featured in issue 49. spot-on. There’s an awful lot of checking
involved – I sit with a dozen tabs open at
a time so I can check everything. It’s the
obscurity of some of the references that’s the
hardest bit. For instance, I’ve just had to try
to check on theatre productions that Geoffrey
Beevers did in the 1970s. Some of the historical press at Hachette. “Hachette Partworks has
facts can be really fascinating though, so much having to check such a wide range of facts a long history of producing high-quality,
so that I often come over and share them makes me pretty handy in a pub quiz.” informative collections,” says Hachette’s
with the rest of the team. It’s not just details From here, each book is sent off to Natalie Clubb. “While John and Mark plan
on the show itself I’m checking – there are Hachette Partworks, and to the BBC for and actually put each issue of The Complete
so many cultural, historical and scientific approval. After some final detailed reads, a History together – and do a great job of
references that it can be quite dizzying. But volume is ready to be signed off and sent to it – Hachette Partworks takes care of the

PARTWORK ARTWORK
A
s well as designing The Complete
History’s spine art showcasing the
12 Doctors, digital artist Lee Johnson
creates the covers for every volume and
produces montages for each individual story.
“Every story has its own style and tone,”
says Lee, “and this is something I like to
reflect in my work. Whenever I start the story
artwork I rewatch the story for inspiration.
I make a mental note of which characters
I want to include, as well as any props, model
shots, locations, etc. Sometimes I have a
vision of what I want to achieve from the
outset; other times I find an image I really
want to use and work around that. Some
stories, especially those made in the early
years, have very few images to work with.
I often have to put together composites of
characters using images from other stories
and/or screengrabs.
“I begin by cutting out the main images
and arranging them in position,” he explains.
“I then start adding the background and
adjusting the colouring and lighting to give
the artwork a feeling that matches the tone of
the story. Finally I add effects to the image to
give it extra depth. The whole process usually
takes two to three days.”
Lee’s passion for the subject helps
him to cope with the relentless
schedule. “I can’t think of a job
I’d like more than producing
Doctor Who artwork,” he says.
“It’s something I used to do
for fun in my free time,
now I get paid to do it.
The Complete History is an
incredible project and it’s
something I’m extremely
proud to be part of.”

80 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
 was decided that this should take
place at [prop-maker] Shawcraft’s
workshops in Uxbridge, and it
was suggested that the creature
should be placed against a rocky
background for photos with “two
gorgeous girls”. This went ahead
on Monday 6 March [1967], but
without the girls or the rocks.’
“There’s a drollness to that
final line that’s hard to resist.
It made me sit back and think
that, around 50 years ago, the
responsibility for organising that
photo shoot made up some
poor soul’s Monday morning.
There’s a pathos and humanity to
it that I think defines a lot of the
behind-the-scenes history of Doctor Who –
and that has continued to the present day.

“Having to read 148 pages all These little moments are important to ensure
The Complete History isn’t just a heavy list of

about my favourite show isn’t

regurgitated facts without any context. It
keeps us sane when we’re editing too!”
John agrees that “Reading the text can

the worst challenge I’ve had to be eye-opening – discovering things that I’d
forgotten or never knew in the first place. Above left: The

face as an editor!” Natalie Clubb

I also enjoy seeing the final pages with the beginning of issue 40’s
Pre-production section
photography in place and Lee Johnson’s on Silence in the
lovely imagery for each story. And I really like Library/Forest of the
actual printing of the volume and then its different ways over the years. And there’s seeing the library of books grow, slotting in Dead (2008).
distribution to shops. We also look after all always something new popping up that each volume in the appropriate place.” Above right: Designer
the subscribers and make sure they receive adds to our understanding of a story, or new “It’s such an enormous privilege to be Paul Vyse.
their issues. things coming to light in interviews. The asked to work on a project like this, which Below left: Each issue
“As editor at Hachette, it’s my job to check sheer volume of all that information is quite I will look back on when we’re done with is a hardback book
over the whole edition before it goes to overwhelming sometimes. great affection and pride,” Mark reflects. and the spines build to
print to make sure all the copy is there and “There are little moments in every issue “I think this will stand as the largest single form a montage of the
first 12 Doctors.
everything looks correct. Because we produce that will make me chuckle,” he adds. “Going discussion of the behind-the-scenes history
an issue each fortnight, we work to quite over text for The Macra Terror, for example, of Doctor Who in the same unified format, and Below right: A Macra
makes do without
a tight schedule – which can sometimes be this particular passage made me howl with that’s something lovely to have. I hope people gorgeous girls. Or a
a bit hectic. That said, having to read 148 laughter: ‘A request was later made by the will have this collection on their bookcases rocky background.
pages all about my favourite show isn’t the Press Office to arrange another photo shoot, for many years as a reference point.” DWM
worst challenge I’ve had to face as an editor!” this time for shots of the Macra monster. It
Natalie also checks the books’
spines, which is an important part
of the collection as issue by issue the
spines build to form a montage of the
12 Doctors. “I make sure that each
issue’s spine has the correct part of the
overall picture on it, so it will all work
when eventually put together. This is
something that was carefully planned
out when we first started working on
the project and it’s a huge job. But it’s
satisfying to see the picture build each
time I file an office copy.”

T
he history of the making of Doctor Who
is so vast and, according to John, “a
partwork is just about the only realistic
way to document it all and present it in a
consistent format. There is a huge appetite
for information about Doctor Who, and Doctor
Who fans have always been interested in how
television is made – which, of course, has
changed dramatically since Doctor Who was
first broadcast. And fans seem to appreciate
consistency, which is one of the first rules of
producing a partwork.”
Maintaining this consistency isn’t easy,
though. “The history of Doctor Who is a
constantly evolving mass of facts and figures,”
Mark points out, “and some ‘facts’ are open
to interpretation. What one person may
take as gospel fact has been interpreted in

REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 81 . .

 What’s in a Name?
The research that goes into Doctor Who reference books
and magazines has helped to define the series itself.
FEATURE BY MARCUS HEARN

F
or fans of Star Trek, James Bond or
any of the other great franchises, the
facts are immutable – there has
never been any doubt about the
correct titles of episodes, books
or films. Typically, the history of
Doctor Who is more complicated. The
first 25 stories, broadcast from 1963 to 1966, were
comprised of individually named episodes, with no
on-screen indication of their collective titles.
Identifying the correct names for these early
serials would have been a valuable feature of the
earliest reference books and magazines, but they
instead sowed seeds of confusion that lasted
decades. In 1972 the first edition of The Making of
Doctor Who ducked the issue, while the Radio Times
special published the following year included an
episode guide that suggested each serial was named
after its first episode. The first story was therefore
referred to as An Unearthly Child, the second was
The Dead Planet, the third was The Edge of Destruction
and so on. These were just three examples of story
titles that were never used by Doctor Who’s original
production team, either before, during or after the
making of those serials.
Over the next 20 or so years numerous other
titles were proposed, and eventually An Unearthly
Child, The Daleks and The Edge of Destruction
seemed to stick for the serials with the designated
production codes A, B and C.
In the early 1990s, however, new research yielded
proof of the titles actually intended by original Doctor
Who producer Verity Lambert and her colleagues.
Serial A was 100,000 BC, serial B was The Mutants and
serial C was Inside the Spaceship. These are the titles
that have been adopted by Doctor Who Magazine
ever since, although there are still many who prefer to
stick to the previous, ‘unofficial’ versions.
This situation reveals much about the symbiotic
relationship that exists between the television
series and its audience. Here was a group of fans
who collectively decided on widely recognised
titles for their favourite show, before sheer tenacity
uncovered the long-lost truth.
When it comes to story titles it doesn’t really
matter which side of the fence you sit on, because
either way you’re part of a unique situation. Most
fans are defined by the films and television shows
they admire. Since the early 1970s, Doctor Who has
been a series at least partly defined by its fans. DWM

In the early 1990s, new research yielded

proof of the titles actually intended
by original Doctor Who producer
Verity Lambert and her colleagues.

Clockwise from top:

This list of story titles
was compiled by a
member of the Doctor
Who production team
in 1965; producer
Verity Lambert pictured
in November 1963;
story editor David
Whitaker made
handwritten notes on
this document, which
gives serial B the lyrical
title Beyond the Sun;
another document from
1963, listing working
titles for what were
proposed to be the first
three stories.

82 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

. .
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REFERENCING THE DOCTOR 83 . .

 REFERENCING THE DOCTOR
“There was a lot of ‘assumed fact’ around Doctor Who as no-one had ever
taken the trouble to find out what the real facts were.” David J Howe
More has been written about Doctor Who than any other television series in history.
What prompts this exhaustive analysis? And how was research into the show’s complex production
conducted in the years before home video, conventions and dedicated magazines?
This unique publication tells the story behind some of the landmark books devoted to Doctor Who, revealing
the extraordinary efforts that fans and historians have made to better understand their favourite programme.

DWM Special Edition #47

Autumn 2017